


and all I can taste is this moment

by nostalgicplant



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 1960s Garrison cold war au, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, F/F, Galaxy Garrison, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Slow Burn, also allura doesnt die (obviously) because i don't have rocks for brains, everyone is gay because I said so, graphic descriptions of how ugly garrison uniforms are, im basically bob the builder of adashi, implied klance, they got PLAYED by canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 05:25:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 48,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19660729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicplant/pseuds/nostalgicplant
Summary: "Takashi, what am I to you?""Everything."or, the one where shiro is the garrison's golden boy in the midst of the cold war, adam is his wicked smart best friend that he can't stop staring at for some reason, allura's meeting place of choice is broom closets, and romelle just wants everyone to get their shit together.a piece about finding an identity, a home, and love.





	and all I can taste is this moment

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to this absolute monster of a piece! thank GOD it’s finally over. I started this over six months ago, but then life and work and everything got in the way, so… here is my (very) belated Adashi piece! Written out of love for the history of US space race era and also everyone’s favorite gay space cadets.  
> Me: write an adashi fic  
> Me: omg, make it a Garrison adashi fic  
> Me: COLD WAR ADASHI GARRISON CADET FIC  
> This… got out of hand fast. It’s set in the early 1960s, the Garrison is a joint venture between NASA and the Department of Defense, and most of the history, jet information, and timelines are close to accurate. Except for the tech… which I took a few liberties on because it’s an AU and I’m the sheriff of this city which means I make the rules. Fiction. I tried to loosely follow the events of the space race between this period as inspiration for the plot progression.  
> title from iris by the goo goo dolls  
> This whole fic was inspired by some lovely fanart by kaiayame that I saw months ago and I’ve been draft-writing this piece ever since.  
> [and all I can taste is this moment](https://kaiayame.tumblr.com/post/176133732670/and-all-i-can-taste-is-this-moment)
> 
> also, HUGE thank you to cassie, aka [lesbianlura](https://lesbianlura.tumblr.com/) for fixing all my critical grammar errors and helping me shake off the dust from not having written in forever. you're the best!!!
> 
> you can find me at happyleakira on tumblr.  
> [come say hi!](https://happyleakira.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Fasten your seatbelts and have a great flight! ;)

_Sure, there are probably_

_infinite dimensions, but I’m_

_with you in this one, so why_

_would I try to find them?_

-Neil Hilborn

* * *

There is absolutely nothing like flying, Takashi Shirogane, sixteen, almost-professional pilot, assumes. He assumes because he hasn’t been allowed to fly (yet), but if the simulator gives him any idea of what flight is like, Shiro is going to be hungry for it for the rest of his life.

He swings left, right, around an asteroid, switches gears manually, brake checks his pursuers, then spins around and blasts them. The seat of the simulator rocks with the impact of the blast and vibrates when the “Level 5 Complete” banner flashes on-screen. Shiro rolls his shoulders, prepared to advance to the next level, feeling thirty-two of the most promising cadets in the nation’s eyes glaring into his back. No one before him has gotten past level three.

Behind him, Lieutenant Commander Iverson clears his throat, and Shiro turns slowly.

“I’ve seen all I need to see,” Iverson says carefully.

Shiro rests his shaking fingers against the cracked foam of the yoke. Unlike when the rest of the cadets flew, Iverson’s face is no longer turned into a permanent frown. Instead, his face is carefully blank, but Shiro notices the difference when Iverson just hums and writes something down on his clipboard instead of barking “next” as he carefully unbuckles himself and rises from the seat.

When he stands, he feels ten feet tall. His back is wet from sweat and his eyes ache from the strain of watching the neon display for too long. The rest of the cadets watch him with hungry eyes. He’s the one to beat, now. They’ve all only been here a couple weeks, but competition to take the top rankings is fierce already. Anything less than perfection is an automatic qualifier for judgement.

Finally, as Shiro rejoins the line, one cadet reaches out toward the burning star and speaks. “Congrats, man. Great flying!” His eyes are a deep caramel and his hair is tousled from sweat and the headset. He extends his arm toward Shiro. Shiro doesn’t remember anything about his flight, which is embarrassing, because this is the first effort anyone’s made to speak to him since they all arrived. “I’m Adam.”

Shiro stumbles forward and grasps Adam’s sweaty teenage palm with his own. They shake, briefly, boys posing as soldiers, and then return to their places in line. Shiro looks down at his own hands, the two that flew the simulator, the two that took the exams to get here, the two that flipped the pages and the channels for his whole childhood, and smiles.

Iverson releases them shortly after Shiro’s flight. A few more cadets fly the simulator; no one breaks Shiro’s record. Everyone filters out of the cramped simulation space, eager to return to their new rooms with their new friends and shower before the mess hall opens for dinner.

His room is bare except for his duffel bag, still half-packed, resting against the left leg of his desk, and the wrinkled copy of National Geographic featuring John Glenn’s three orbits of the earth. It was a parting gift from his foster family before he left, pressed into his hands as he stood awkwardly in the doorway, unsure of how to thank them for keeping a permanent guest in their home for a year.

Shiro sets his backpack on the floor, sits on his bed (hard, uncomfortable), pulls his knees tight to his chest, and takes a deep breath. His uniform is a size too large, and itchy in all the worst places. He misses his thrift-store flannels. He misses his scuffed Converse and bedroom window that looked out into the forest. There are no windows in the Garrison barracks.

He thinks about the feeling of flying, instinctually knowing what to do to guide the simulator. The adrenaline coursing through his veins. The steady, sure yoke clasped beneath his fists. Something that follows his commands. Something that listens.

The next time Shiro checks the clock, it’s time for dinner. He doesn’t change out of the scratchy uniform. He doesn’t have his Converse anymore, just the secondhand Garrison-issue boots that are wearing blisters in the back of Shiro’s heels because they’re a half size too big.

At dinner, everyone wants to know Shiro’s secret for flying the simulator. Standing in the line to get his rations, the kid next to him asks if anyone in his family was a pilot. Shiro can’t remember his name for the life of him.

“Uh,” Shiro said. “No?”

“Oh,” the curly-haired boy had said. “Well, you’re shaping up to be the best pilot that’s gone through the Garrison in a long time. My dad is an engineer and he said that the simulator is practically programmed to fail people.” He grabs his stale bread roll and trots off. “See you ‘round, Shiro.”

Shiro starts to call out to him – say something like ‘actually, it’s Takashi’ – but then there’s Iverson, tongue tumbling over the syllables of Shiro’s name and Executive Order 1066 lingering twenty years too long.

SHIRO. The code the Garrison uses to refer to him. Posted on the first day for room assignments, printed in block letters on his class schedule, scrawled at the top of the class rank list after their first exam.

Maybe this is the universe giving Shiro a second chance. A blank slate.

He doesn’t correct the boy. After he’s walked away, his name comes to him. Cadet Holt.

Shiro picks a table that’s sparsely populated, shivering as he feels the pinpricks of a roomful of eyes following his movement. One of the kids at the table Shiro chooses spends so much brain power gaping at Shiro that the mac and cheese he was eating falls off his fork and lands with a splat on his chest.

Shiro shrugs under their scrutiny. He isn’t used to being the center of attention. Then.

“’Scuse me, but can I sit here?” It isn’t really a question. By the time Shiro is looking up to see who has arrives, a plastic orange Garrison tray comes sliding across the scratched plastic cafeteria table. A body follows the tray, pushing Cadet Moya and his mess of mac n cheese out of the way, and then Adam just about spills into Shiro’s lap. The boy from earlier, hair soft and clean now. Same bright eyes, boxy glasses, and bold declarations of friendship.

“Watcha eating?” He asks Shiro, winking as he picks up a fork and eats the cafeteria-rationed mac ‘n cheese. It’s funny because there are no other options on Friday dinner than the mac ‘n cheese. It’s a sick delight for a teenager.

Shiro blinks at the boy in surprise. The eyes following Shiro start to peel away. He slowly reaches for the wrapper of the plastic forks and unwraps his, following suit and taking a bite of the lukewarm food.

“You doing anything after this?” Adam asks offhandedly. Shiro shakes his head no and Adam just barrels on, filling the awkward spaces while other kids mumble and disperse. “Since I got here, I've been going to the library when I can.” He continues. “The librarian saves copies of the newspaper for me.” His voice lowers to a hush. “The Soviets just launched the first spy satellite into space. The Garrison isn’t talking about it because ours is still in production. But that doesn’t matter. We’re going to beat them to the _moon_. And one of us is going to do it.” He gestures to the hall around him, filled with cadets beaming with promise for the next generation.

Shiro surveys the cafeteria, filled with cadets, teachers, and officials. It seems unlikely that any of these gangly 16-year-old limbs are going to make history someday.

“Cool?” Shiro says, unsure of what kind of response Adam is expecting. The boy smiles.

“I just thought you should know, given that someday, you’re going to pilot the greatest mission in the history of the United States. And I’m going to be your copilot.”

Shiro fumbles. The boy is still smiling at him, steaming pile of mac ‘n cheese on his plate, charging headfirst into Shiro’s life. He isn’t sure what to say to that. What to do with that.

“And,” Adam continues, perhaps picking up on Shiro’s hesitation. “You always eat alone and then go back to your dorm right after. The librarians and I talk conspiracy theories. You should join us.”

Somehow, it is just that simple. Shiro lets out the breath he didn’t know he was holding and huffs a laugh.

“Okay.” He says, simply. Adam smiles a little bit wider and pushes his rectangular glasses higher up on his nose before picking up his plastic fork and digging into his dinner. When Shiro turns to eat his own, now cold, mac ‘n cheese, it is with a tiny smile on his face.

* * *

Shiro is fifteen years old. He heard about the Garrison through his social worker, who came to see him at his foster family’s house and told him very kindly that his state test results had come back very high, and she had an interesting opportunity for him.

Space had always seemed so foreign and far away. When Shiro watched the news with his foster family after dinner, he heard of the tensions between the United States and the USSR, watched each country volley satellite after satellite into space, but it had always been so distant. Shiro was a world away, just a boy trying to figure out his place in a new school and a new family. Everything these days felt distant, most of all the world of the stars that Shiro couldn’t even touch.

When he asked his science teacher about what space must be like, she’d tucked her long hair behind her ears.

“A battleground,” she’d told him. “Today? Space exploration isn’t a pursuit of knowledge, but a thirst for power.”

When Shiro had told her that he had an interview to be an incoming cadet, she had smiled in a bittersweet way, the same way that foster parents always smile before they tell Shiro they can’t house him any longer, and wished him good luck.

He remembers the drive to the interview for the Garrison, wearing a white shirt that was a size too large for him, pressed with so much starch that when he went to bend his elbows, the shirt crunched and refused to give. His foster father had lent him a tie – Shiro’s first. It was black and red striped, and too thick and long for Shiro’s slim frame. A boy: dressed up in a man’s clothing.

Nonetheless, his social worker, Nina, had smiled when she’d picked him up and ushered him into her Jeep. Shiro sat in the front, feeling tall and important, but still twisting his hands with nerves.

“So, this interview?” he’d asked. “Is to get into the Garrison Academy for their space exploration program?”

Nina hums. “Kind of. The Garrison offers many different pathways for bright young students like yourself to pursue. Engineering, research, space flight – and of course, subdivisions of each. Your state tests were high enough to qualify you for further examination and an oral interview.”

“Which is what we’re going to do right now?”

“Yep.”

They drive in silence for a little while. Nina pulls onto the freeway and they coast along, billboards speeding past. Shiro reads them as they fly by to distract him from his nerves.

_‘Put a winner in your tank.’ A tiger, in the backseat of a Chevrolet. A Coca-Cola ad of a woman in a wide-brimmed hat._

Shiro thinks of his father, working all through the day and most of the night, still finding time to play rocketship with his son in the living room of their shared apartment.

_An ad for sliced ham. Gordon’s Gin or Vodka. Billboard’s Top Hits of 1961._

His father. Pointing at the stars on a rare clear night, laying on the grass of their local park. “Hoshi,” his father had said, pointing to the glimmering flecks above. Shiro had repeated the word back, dutifully. _Star._

_Folger’s coffee. Betty Sue’s Drive in Diner. A blank billboard, save for the words ‘Advertise here! Call today!’ pasted at the bottom in a slanted red font._

The soft hand of a police officer, a gruff voice saying, “son, it’s about your father.” And then, later, a woman with kind eyes wrapping a young boy in a blanket and leading him to the backseat of a car. Shiro, not crying through any of it, just staring blankly ahead, into the inky black of the night, his father’s breath from where he kissed Shiro’s forehead before leaving for work still lingering.

Nina pulls the car into a parking lot of a lone building, standing amiss within the pines of the Oregon forest. Painted onto the massive concrete building are the words “USA GARRISON OUTPOST 408” in a vibrant orange. A security guard stands outside the door, idly playing with his badge.

They step out of the car, and Shiro looks down to notice is how scuffed his shoes are. They belong to his foster brother, who Shiro has also borrowed the too-large white shirt from. He’s three years older, and he’s seen enough foster children come and go to keep a healthy detachment from the newest occupant of the household. Nina finds him staring at the shoes and bends down in front of him. She pulls the sleeve of her white sweater over her palm and carefully rubs the toes of the shoes.

Shiro makes a startled noise, watching the two-inch square of her jacket slowly turn a melancholy black. When she rises, it is with a gentle grin. “Ready?” She offers her arm to him. He looks down at his shoes, still dull but no longer scuffed. The dark patch on Nina’s sweater remains. He takes her arm, and they march toward the guard.

There are twenty other kids in the foul-smelling yellow lobby of the Garrison office. Nina takes a seat and pulls a fresh copy of People magazine from her purse. She offers it to Shiro as an afterthought, a raised eyebrow as she pokes him in the arm with one of the corners. He shakes his head, not wanting to ruin Nina’s sweater _and_ her reading material, and settles for alternating between the CNN broadcast and watching the other candidates file in.

Everyone is eerily still. For a room full of twenty children and their parents, the hush is deafening. A cough or clearing of the throat brings the attention of the room. Perhaps this is their first test, Shiro thinks: who can be the most invisible? He is very good at being invisible. Shiro has been practicing being invisible since his father died.

One boy is reading “Catch-22,” which Shiro knows because he has his own copy stashed under his bed at home. He thinks of the main character – doomed no matter what choice he makes. A pilot with an impossible mission. The boy reading the book is not very far along, and the copy looks brand new – Shiro wonders if he brought the book in order to appear impressive to the interviewers.

Looking around, everyone seems to have something that will make them stand out to interviewers. The acne-faced boy across from Shiro has a ‘National Honor Society’ pin on the lapel of his freshly-pressed jacket. There is a girl in the far corner flicking through a copy of Scientific American. Another boy sits sandwiched between two impressive-looking parents, one in a three-piece suit and the other in a neat black dress.

He feels out of place, wearing hand-me-down clothing and sitting next to his social worker, who is catching up with the latest drama of New York fashion week.

The room is steadily growing warmer as more parents and children arrive. Shiro pulls at the collar of his shirt where the starch and stiff material have irritated his skin. Sweat trickles down his back and his breath grows tight. Just when he feels as if he’s going to pop, a door opens and reveals a sharp-faced woman standing with a clipboard.

“All potential candidates for the Garrison Cadet Program, please say ‘here’ when I call your name and proceed to the testing room.” The woman declares, marching into the room. Her heels click on the ground as she crosses the yellow linoleum floors. And then, as an afterthought; “Recruits will proceed to take a 1 hour written examination followed by individual interviews. Please retrieve your children by 3 pm, at the latest. Results will be dispatched within the coming week.”

Without further ado, she begins rattling off names, and one by one, teenagers begin rising, bidding their families goodbye with a thumbs up or a smile, and follow each other down the corridor in the direction of the testing room.

When they call Shiro’s name, Nina squeezes his arm reassuringly and he departs with a smile, palms sweaty and chest still tight. He walks down the corridor, following the boy who read Catch-22, and he does not look back.

* * *

The results come a week later.

_On behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Garrison Academy would like to welcome Takashi Shirogane to the 1962 Pilot Program…_

* * *

Over the next few weeks, despite a busy class schedule, physical training, and spending as much time in the simulator as possible, Shiro still manages to hang out with Adam. Sometimes, they go to the library, pouring over the day’s latest news. Other times, they do homework side by side, spread out onto the cool floor of their dormitories. They’ve tried to spar, but where Adam is a genius in the classroom, Shiro shines on the combat floor. Adam makes calculations; Shiro takes risks. Somehow, they’ve become the Garrison duo – friendly to all, but belonging to a closed sphere that only includes the two of them.

The ‘Shiro’ nickname spreads. Shiro finds himself so frequently in the number one spot that classmates begin only calling him by the sobriquet, indicative of his top standings. The professors overhear it in the classroom, and the transition is instant. Shiro is catchier and easier than Takashi. He is a brilliant pilot and an eager student. Teachers love him; his classmates envy him.

It doesn’t take long until Adam is the only one who still calls him Takashi. “You’re more than a simulation ranking,” he had said when Shiro had asked why. “You’re a whole person, not five characters on a scoreboard.”

Here, it is so, so easy to forget about his past. Nina the social worker, with her smudged sweater sleeves and wrinkles by her eyes, is easy to push to the back of his memory. His foster family and the twelve months he spent with them fall away. His father’s memory stays just that – a memory. No one asks about Shiro’s family. No one cares that he’s an orphan. For once, he is not at some great disadvantage, a social pariah. He carefully avoids questions about where he is from. He keeps his grades high and his flight simulator scores excellent, earns his scholarship.

And for a little while, Shiro is untouchable.

During astrophysics, in April of 1963 - almost the end of his first year at the Garrison - Shiro is called from class. Adam watches him go with worried eyes, and he feels the eyes of the class on his back as he carefully rises from his seat to follow the secretary out of the room. As the door closes behind him, Shiro can hear the teacher continue his lecture about theoretical wormholes.

“Am I in trouble?” Shiro asks the small woman leading him down the hallway. He runs a hand through messy black hair. The woman just shrugs.

“You’re wanted by Lieutenant Commander Iverson,” she says, as if that answers any of Shiro’s questions.

They reach Iverson’s office, and the woman holds the door open for him, but does not follow. Iverson is sitting at his desk, window behind him cracked, smoking a cigar. Shiro is startled by the intimacy of the room.

“Sir.” Shiro addresses his commanding officer.

Iverson waves to the upholstered seat in front of the desk. “Take a seat, cadet.”

He settles into the chair, shifting his weight to get comfortable before speaking. “Is something wrong, sir?”

Iverson has the audacity to laugh. He sets the cigar on an ashtray on his desk and plucks a manila file off the top of a stack of identical files. He opens it and slides it across to Shiro.

At the top of the paper is Shiro’s name, his ID photo, his rank, and then, below, his results on each simulator test and exam grades.

Shiro looks up at Iverson. He wonders if Iverson is here to accuse him of cheating.

But Iverson just slides the file back over in front of him, picks up the cigar and takes a puff, and then closes the file all together.

“Shirogane, you have the highest combined tests and simulator scores the Garrison has yet to see in the history of the program.”

Oh. Shiro’s stomach swoops. He isn’t here to be accused of cheating.

Iverson continues. “President Kennedy is going to be visiting the Garrison next month to meet with some head officials and do some PR.”

Shiro knows this. It has been the talk of the cadet class, everyone eager to welcome the president. An opportunity to see the President of the United States speak? To hear him broadcast space exploration as the frontier of conquest, and to be a part of that history? To defeat, beat the Soviets to the moon? The whole galaxy is just within their youthful grasp.

He realizes in the pregnant pause that has followed Iverson’s words that Shiro is expected to respond.

“Yes, sir, I’ve heard so,” he says uncertainly.

“Good,” Iverson replies. “There’s going to be an interview panel discussing the future of space exploration and technology. Members include senior staff, researchers, key media personnel, the President.” He pauses. “And you.”

Shiro blinks. “Me?”

“There is no better individual to showcase the future of United States space exploration than you. The idea is that President Kennedy is going to do a short interview with you about your experience at the Garrison and your aspirations for the future in front of a media team after the meeting. The goal is to showcase key figures and rising stars. We’re going to need to get you to have your parents send you a suit from home, and we can accommodate if they would like to come and watch the live taping as well.” Iverson examines the cigar before raising his eyes to look at Shiro. “Would you be interested?”

It is not a question.

“Y-yes,” Shiro fumbles before he finds his words. “I’d be honored, sir. To represent the Garrison, sir. Yes, sir.” He blushes. “I just. Uh. Don’t have a suit.”

“We’ll work on your interview skills,” Iverson says with a wave of his hand. “And I’m sure your family can arrange one for you.”

The silence stretches. Shiro suddenly feels awkward and small, no longer the proud and smiling boy who had been invited to meet _the President of the United-fucking-States_. He is the naive boy from a year ago again, sitting next to his social worker in the waiting room of a Garrison outpost, uncomfortable and unsure of himself.

“I’m in the foster system, sir,” he blurts out. “I don’t – ” _have a family_. The unsaid words hang over the room. Iverson looks startled, as if he’s crossed an invisible line and gone a step too far. Shiro rushes to remedy his error. “I can call my social worker?”

Nina, who he hasn’t talked to in almost a year, since she drove him to the airport to leave for Arizona and the Garrison last September. She had been so proud of Shiro, so excited for his future. Shiro had promised to write, and he still has her address crumpled at the bottom of his duffle bag, but he just never found the time or effort to do it.

“Ah,” Iverson says, recovering quickly. “I’m sure accommodations can be made.”

Shiro exhales. “Thank you, sir.”

“Further instruction will come in the next few days. Don’t tell the other cadets about this, or I’ll end up with an earful from every rich brat’s parents who want their kid to meet the president, too. You’re dismissed.”

Shiro rises shakily, unsure if he is supposed to bow, or shake Iverson’s hand, or do _anything_ , so he settles on a quick wave and a rapid departure. The door slams closed behind him, and Shiro finds himself in the waiting room, the secretary who had led him to the office nowhere to be found. He leaves the room, standing in the cool concrete corridor, and allows himself one fist-pump in celebration before returning to class.

* * *

Adam finds him after class, once Shiro has slipped back into the room and sat, dazed and uncomprehending, through the remaining half hour of the lecture. He jots down key phrases that sound important, but all he can hear in his mind is the endless ‘best cadet,’ ‘rising star,’ and ‘interview President Kennedy’ like a busted tape recorder.

“What was that about?” Adam demands as they leave the room, books pressed to their chests. His brown hair lops into his eyes, curly and unruly. Shiro is caught off-guard by the intensity of his caramel eyes. Adam is demanding, relentless in his pursuit of the truth. 

Shiro glances around to the mass of milling students, who are all peering at Shiro out of the corners of their eyes and whispering to their friends. He thinks of Iverson’s words, warning him not to spill the beans.

“I’ll tell you later, ‘kay?” Shiro says out of the corner of his mouth. Adam looks as if he is going to protest, but Shiro cuts him off. “I’m not in trouble. I’m just not really supposed to tell anyone.” He leaves ‘but I’m going to tell you anyway’ unsaid. Adam gets the hint and backs off.

“You missed Powel making an idiot of himself in front of the class,” Adam says instead, diverting the conversation.

“Don’t be rude.” Shiro elbows Adam between the ribs playfully.

“He tried to justify colonialism last semester. I’m like, legally allowed to bully him.” Shiro smiles, looking sideways at the boy walking next to him. Adam is rolling his eyes behind his boxy glasses, but the youthful glint never leaves him. There is nothing mean or cold about Adam Waseb, and it shows. How he talks Shiro through difficult math concepts, quizzes him until dawn on the mechanics of flight, has the biggest smile when ‘SHIRO’ sits in the #1 simulator position for the thirteenth week in a row.

“Hey, did you ever finish the homework Montgomery assigned for modern history?” Shiro asks.

“Yeah,” Adam shifts his textbooks into his other hand, using his free arm to swing his forearm around Shiro’s shoulders. He smells vaguely like ink, probably from taking notes and then smudging whatever color pen he’s been using all over the rim of his glasses. Shiro knows this from continued observation of the frequent blue stripe across the bridge of Adam’s nose. “Why?”

“Can I copy it?”

Adam rolls his eyes and fake shoves Shiro. He bounces off another cadet, apologizing with a hurried ‘sorry! sorry!’ before falling back into stride with Adam.

“Fuck you,” Adam says. “Yes, but let the record show that I _told_ you staying up late to read all the classified Roswell files you broke out of the records room was a bad idea.”

Shiro throws his hands up. “The door wasn’t even locked! It’s not breaking in if they’re practically inviting you.”

Adam laughs, a sound that ricochets through Shiro’s chest. “Whatever, golden boy.”

They scurry toward the bathroom so Shiro can scribble down the names of every Austro-Hungarian emperor in the last two hundred years before class. Shiro loves history, but hey. He’s sixteen. Aliens are always going to beat out Ferdinand the First.

* * *

“Okay,” Adam says, legs folded as he sits on Shiro’s bed that night. “Tell me why you got pulled from class.”

It has taken them this long to get a moment alone. After their astrophysics class, they headed to modern history, and after that, lunch. Then physical conditioning, which is like PE without any rules, where Adam was clocked by a stray dodgeball and was sent to the nurse’s office with a bloody nose. Then free period, most of which was spent with Adam in said nurse’s office while he held a bag of frozen peas across his face and lamented that his face was going to look, to quote Adam, ‘like a housewife with bad plastic surgery.’

But now, night has fallen, and the rest of the cadets have wandered off to their rooms, which leaves the two boys sitting in Shiro’s single room, crammed onto his uncomfortably hard twin bed, books and secrets scattered between them.

Adam’s face, by all means, kind of looks like crap, Shiro notices when he looks up from the passage he was taking notes on. His nose is swollen and red, and there is a faint bruise beginning to blossom under his left eye. He should look bad, with the big white strip of gauze tape drawing a horizontal line across his face.

Except (and Shiro makes careful note of this), he doesn’t think Adam looks bad at all. In fact, sitting here, in the dim light of Shiro’s bedroom, his face cast in devilish curiosity, Shiro thinks Adam looks pretty good.

He files this away as a problem for a future Shiro to sort out and opens his mouth.

“You know how President Kennedy is coming to visit the Garrison in March?”

Adam nods. He continues.

“Well. Lieutenant Commander Iverson wants me to, uh, be interviewed by him.”

Shiro winces at his own words. All day, he has been mulling over this opportunity, and with finality, Shiro has decided that how he feels about it can be summed up with two adjectives: terrified and awkward.

Terrified because, well, he’s sixteen and he’s going to meet with the president to talk about the future that Shiro is going to be a part of. On live television. In front of the entire world. And like, god, not to be vain, but what if he breaks out that day and all anyone can remember from the interview is his splotchy face?

One part terrified, two parts awkward. There’s no doubt that Shiro is the top of his class, but this feels like being singled out. He can only imagine the jealously of the other cadets once they find out that Shiro _alone_ is going to get to speak to the President. It feels like a status declaration that Shiro never wanted. Where he spent most of his life practicing being invisible, taking up as little space as possible as to never be an inconvenience, he is about to become panoptic – incapable of being overlooked and seen only through a single lens.

Adam’s eyes grow cartoonishly wide.

“You’re going to meet the president?” he asks, mouth agape.

Shiro blushes and nods, ducking his head to avoid looking Adam in the eyes. 

“The real ass _president_?” He leans across the bed to nudge Shiro’s knee. Shiro looks up through a fringe of block bangs. Adam is grinning at him, a devious smile painted on his face. There is no jealously or judgement there, just awe and pride.

“I guess,” Shiro says with a huff. “I mean, if it works out.” He waves his hands.

Adam hops off the bed and paces around the room. “What are you going to say?” He turns to face Shiro, who is still sitting on the bed, watching him walk. “We’re going to have to practice for this. Oh my god, Takashi, this is incredible!”

“You’re not… jealous?” Shiro asks, words slowly falling out of his mouth. Adam gives him an incredulous look.

“Of course I’m not jealous, you absolute _moron_. You deserve this more than anyone else in this shitty school.”

“I think they’re only picking me because I’m a good pilot,” he muses. Adam rolls his eyes and abandons his pacing to cross the room and plant his hands firmly on Shiro’s shoulders.

He leans in, and he smells like laundry soap. Fresh and clean, as opposed to Shiro, who always feels like he smells like sweat and the stale simulator air. Adam is saying something, his lips are moving, and Shiro realizes too late that he isn’t listening at all, distracted watching the curl and release of Adam’s lips.

“-you get that, right? Takashi? Earth to space cadet.” Shiro breaks rank with Adam’s face and leans back. Adam is less than a foot away from his face, bright eyed and serious, a faint smile ghosting his lips. His curly hair is mussed in every direction, and his glasses are just slightly askew on his face.

_Oh my god_ , Shiro thinks, _I could totally kiss him right now._

And then immediately after.

_Oh my god, what the fuck?_

“Um,” Shiro starts, but Adam appears to have abandoned his previous train of thought.

“I’m proud of you,” Adam says, seriously this time. “You’re going to be the best damn pilot the world has ever seen, you know that?”

And Shiro thinks. How he joined the Garrison on a recommendation from test scores, filled out the application because he knew he would never be able to pay for college, applied for housing because he wouldn’t have to live with foster families, and thinks. That maybe, this is what he was meant to do all along. That there was no place for him anywhere else but at the Garrison, planning missions to outfly the Soviets, meeting with the President of the United States, meeting genius boys who drove him to work harder, faster, smarter.

All monumental observations, but his stupid brain is still stuck on the loop of ‘ _I think I want to kiss my best friend, holy mother of Amelia Earhart, fuck!’_ He barely manages to press out a smile.

Adam backs off, settling back down onto the bedspread, and crudely sweeps his books to the ground. “They should have you fly in the demonstration,” he says.

Shiro barks out a harsh laugh. “As if. I’ve never even been inside a jet, better off learn to fly one in a month. They don’t start cadets in flight school until next year.”

“Okay,” Adam counters, “but you’re meeting the _president_ , and you’re Iverson’s favorite.”

“I’m not Iverson’s favorite.”

Adam fixes him with a glare.

“I might be Iverson’s favorite.”

The thought of actually flying sends a shrill beam of excitement through Shiro. To pilot a jet, soaring above the ground at hundreds of miles per hour? He’s been dreaming of that long before he was accepted to the Garrison.

“You should ask,” Adam decides. “What’s the harm in asking?”

There isn’t, really, a harm in asking. Perhaps the harm is in if Iverson says yes, and the yoke under Shiro’s hands turns from cheap plastic to polished medal, if the readings on the altitude gauge turn from altered fiction to fact, if a flashing error warning isn’t from Iverson’s technical hand, but from the wind cupping the wings of the aircraft.

Sure, Shiro wants to fly. But more than anything, he doesn’t want to fail.

“What if I fuck up?” Shiro asks. He turns to Adam, lowers his head into his hands and runs his fingers through his choppy haircut. “What if I say the wrong thing in the interview, what if they let me fly and I look like an idiot?” _Will you think less of me if I’m anything but perfect?_

“It’s TV, Takashi.” Adam rolls his eyes. “If you eat your words, they’ll just cut it from the interview. If you fuck up a flight maneuver - which you won’t, by the way - they won’t air it. This isn’t Khrushchev coming in to do secret ops, it’s propaganda for the military. You’ll beat yourself up about it, all the good footage will air, and we deal with your soaring popularity and begin planning your presidential campaign.” Adam has a soft smile curled onto his lips when Shiro raises his head. “Hm? Shirogane ’64?”

* * *

The next day, Adam busts into the middle of breakfast, where Shiro is eating oatmeal and slowly flicking through a flight manual, and slams himself onto the chair beside him. Shiro turns, taking in the rush in Adam’s[KC2] brown eyes and his messy hair, spread in every direction. Adam almost never joins him for breakfast. He eats at the crack of dawn and spends the mornings in the library, flicking through the morning news and chatting with Ms. Carter about this and that.

Shiro is _not_ awake enough to be discussing the ethics of US foreign policy at seven in the morning. Period.

It’s routine, now. Shiro wakes up, takes a fast shower, stumbles down the cafeteria with just enough time to eat his breakfast slowly and amble to his first class. Adam meets him there, pressed uniform tucked in neatly to creased slacks and a brief of the morning news headlines prepared. Sometimes, other cadets gather around to hear Adam debrief the cadets on the world. But most mornings, it’s just Shiro.

“You’re not going to believe this, but,” Adam starts. And based on the wicked smile he’s wearing, Shiro really is probably not going to believe it. “-oh, god, I just have to show you. Up!” He tugs on the sleeve of Shiro’s wrinkled uniform and pulls him to his feet. Adam reaches down and picks up his grey backpack in one hand and his half-empty bowl of oatmeal in the other.

He stumbles blindly after Adam, trying to quell thoughts of panic in his head. Has something happened with Castro? Finally? Adam had been hypothesizing for weeks. He tried asking their international relations professor about it once, and subsequently landed himself in detention after abjectly declaring that he didn’t think the government had a good handle on the situation.

Before he’s reached the door, Cadet Altea, the one who keeps challenging Adam for second rank,delicately leans backwards and calls over her shoulder, “Later, Shiro!” It grinds Shiro to a halt, and he stutters for a moment. Adam is still walking toward the door, Shiro’s backpack in his left hand as he dumps the half-eaten bowl of oatmeal in the garbage. He looks over his shoulder to watch Shiro stumble to a stop halfway down the row of benches. Allura is smiling at him, black hair braided down her shoulders. She blinks at him. “In astrophysics?”

ALTEA usually falls between 2rd and 3th on the flight simulators, constantly duking it out with Adam for the spot after Shiro. She’s clever in class and works her ass off to improve her simulator scores (Shiro has run into her on the practice simulator at odd hours a couple of times). She’s always been friendly and inquisitive, but never goes out of her way to talk to him. They all have their own circles of friends, and Shiro really isn’t part of hers.

“Uh,” Shiro stammers, “yeah?” He gives her a tentative smile, and she gives him a thumbs-up yes and turns back to her breakfast. Shiro feels his face growing hot. Not in an embarrassed way - in the way where you feel like you’ve been seen naked in the middle school locker room showers for the first time in your life, and you feel utterly exposed. When he turns back to Adam, starting for the hallway, Adam has a funny look on his face.

They walk through the gliding cafeteria doors and turn left down the stairs to the library. Adam’s gait is less jaunty, now. He carries more tension in his shoulders, and his neck is stiff. Shiro hates how well he knows Adam that he knows this.

“You’re popular.” Adam turns to him as they descend. The funny look on his face is gone, replaced with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He forces out half a laugh. “She totally likes you, man.”

Shiro feels his face growing more heated. “She does not.”

“Mhm,” Adam says, which is the noise he makes when he knows he’s right, despite what Shiro thinks.

“Adam!” Shiro bumps against Adam’s shoulders. “She does not!” They’re laughing as they bounce off the railings. Adam’s shoulders loosen, and his smile reaches further up his cheeks.

The place where their shoulders collided burns hot, like his face after running down the stairs, after being teased about a girl, hot like respect from his peers.

Ms. Carter is resting against the library checkout table when the boys tumble through the door, still laughing and panting. She’s got a cup of coffee in her left hand, reaching slowly to take a sip when Adam turns to Shiro and looks him in the eyes, deadly serious.

“Are you sure you’re ready to see this?” he asks.

The laughter and heat fade immediately from Shiro’s body. “Uh,” he replies, preparing for the worst. He knows that tensions have been getting tighter and tighter, that the Garrison is testing fighters that reach speeds never before obtained, that there’s whispers of _nuclear_ around every corner. What is the Garrison doing at the end of locked hallways?

Ms. Carter rolls her eyes and unfolds the newspaper. And there, on the headlines of the New York Times, reads: “DODGERS SINK CUBS IN COAST GAME, 3-1.”

Adam is still staring at him with expectant eyes, like he’s waiting for Shiro to say something profound.

“I’m,” Shiro says carefully. “Kind of a Giants fan, really.”

Both Carter and Adam groan loudly.

“A Giants fan? Really, Takashi?” Adam points a finger at Shiro’s chest. “And here I was, thinking we were friends.”

Shiro lets out a relieved huff of laughter. “I used to live in San Francisco, actually,” he says. “My dad took me to a game, once.”

He doesn’t really remember it, just fragments. His father had a rare day off work, and they took the bus across the city to the stadium. Shiro wore a baseball hat that he had to keep pushing up on his forehead, out of his eyes. He remembers the smell of asphalt mingling with the warm scent of melted butter on popcorn, the loud rallying chant of the stadium, the crack when wooden bat collided with leather ball.

“I don’t follow baseball,” Shiro continues, reaching forward to examine the headline. “But yeah, sorry, Giants fan.”

“Me and my brothers had season tickets,” Adam wails, “and the one year I don’t have them, the Dodgers finally look like they’re going to _win_ something.”

Shiro knows this. He knows that Adam comes from Southern California, from a large family. His mother is a teacher, his father an engineer, his _jed_ a retired newspaper editor. His siblings, strewn across the United States with dreams of their own. Adam is the youngest of five. He carries the weight of responsibility well.

A homesick Adam had once sat at the foot of Shiro’s bed, closed his eyes, and talked about the Santa Ana winds like they were the breath from his lungs. He knew every major street in Pasadena. His neighbors, their ages, what breed of dog they had. The cross-streets of his middle school, the local grocery store, the mosque. “I’m scared I’ll forget,” Adam had confessed, running his hand along the comforter.

Shiro does not know what it is like to have a home to remember. The Garrison is the first permanent thing he’s ever had.

“He insisted you see this right away,” Ms. Carter laughs. “Though I have to say, I’m more of a Brooklyn Dodgers fan.”

Adam waves his hand dismissively. “The sky is blue. The Dodgers belong in LA. That’s just how it is.”

“Actually,” Shiro interjects, “the sky only appears blue because of the length of the light waves. Same with water.”

Adam sighs, dramatic as ever, and plucks the newspaper from Shiro’s hands. He sets it on the desk behind him, checks his watch, grabs his messenger bag, and with a mock salute to Ms. Carter, starts for the door. “Let’s get to class, mister know-it-all.”

Shiro falls into step beside him, giving a wave over his shoulder to Ms. Carter, who is still chuckling. “Later, boys!” she calls after their retreating backs.

They exit through the library doors and head for the stairs. “You pulled me from breakfast to show me that the Dodgers won a baseball game?” Shiro says with a laugh. “Really, Adam?”

Adam shrugs, and suddenly looks self-conscious. “I don’t know, I know you kind of had a rough night last night, and I wanted to make sure you were okay before class started.”

_Oh_ , Shiro thinks, watching a light pink blush spread across the bridge of Adam’s nose and settle onto the apples of his cheeks. The way he licks his lips and spares a shy glance at Shiro, as if worried about overstepping his boundaries. _He’s worried about me_.

They continue on to class, pushing through the crowded hallways and bumping off each other’s shoulders, Adam talking all the while about ‘the upcoming exhibition’ without ever mentioning Shiro’s name, and he knows that’s just Adam’s way of showing off.

And for the first few periods, he forgets about the whole _thing_ this morning with Allura until their flight simulation class.

* * *

They’re standing in the crowded hallway outside the flight simulator, all thirty-two of them crushed shoulder-to-shoulder. Iverson has his back against the metal door and is scribbling furiously on his clipboard while the cadets mill around.

“What do you think he’s having us do?” Adam asks, a curious glint in his eye.

“Uh,” Shiro looks toward the lieutenant, who now has red ink splattered on his left cheek. He chooses not to comment. “Flight simulator? It’s Thursday, so demo day?”

Across the hallway, he catches Allura taking a peek over Iverson’s shoulder, catching a glimpse at what he’s writing. Her eyes widen immediately, and when she turns back to her friend, the blonde one who always has a sarcastic comment to mutter under her breath whenever Iverson’s back is turned, and whispers it in her ear. Shiro watches and turns back to Adam.

“I’m not sure we know what we’re doing, but Allura sure does.”

Adam raises his eyes to watch the cadets in Allura’s vicinity whisper to one another. She makes eye contact with Shiro and gives a quick wave. He doesn’t get it. Allura hasn’t showed much interest in him at all until Adam came charging in to pluck him from the cafeteria earlier this morning. Usually it’s a cordial ‘hey,’ as they pass through corridors or have to team up for group projects.

Adam takes a breath, as if to say something, but Iverson decided he’s done writing the new Rosetta stone or whatever and slams the clipboard against his legs.

“Attention, cadets!”

Shiro turns to look at Iverson, with his too-starched collar and steely eyes. The way his wrist curls over the clipboard and turns his fingers white from his grip. He remembers the casual glimpse of challenge in Iverson’s eyes when he’d told Shiro that he was choosing him to be interviewed by Kennedy.

“Attention!” The hallway echoes back in singular, haunting union. Conversations are stopped mid-word. Everyone is rapt with intention to Iverson.

“Today, we’re doing a different type of simulator test. It is not only your responsibility to be able to fly solo, but you must also be able to fly in conjunction with other pilots.”

Their last simulator test had been with limited oxygen, to simulate worst-case scenario flight. The oxygen levels had gotten so low that Shiro had seen bright flashes of light dart across his vision as he struggled to get a reading on the altitude meter. For a horrible moment, Shiro entertained the idea of pulling the resignation cord dangling from the left window, but then he took a gulping breath and slammed his left palm into the ‘autopilot off’ switch, and that was that. When he’d stumbled out of the exercise, hands braced against the doors for support, face white, chest heaving, the class had clapped. Shiro had a habit of being the first in and last out of the sim. He’d raised his gaze and smiled back, but his stomach still churned.

He can turn it on under the lights. Even Iverson looked vaguely impressed.

Adam, still standing inches away from him, whaps Shiro hard on the thigh. “Told you something was up.”

Shiro hisses back out of the corner of his mouth: “You said no such thing.”

Adam snickers, but not quiet enough to stop Iverson from rearing to look at two of them. He catches both Adam and Shiro with a sharp glare.

“Something funny, Cadet Waseb?”

The hallway rotates to look at Adam, who is furiously blushing at having been singled out. “No, sir.” He replies, face flushed. The bastard has the audacity to smile through his clear discomfort. “Continue, by all means.”

Iverson makes a face like he wants to continue singling out Adam but doesn’t have a good enough reason to other than that he feels like bullying a 16-year-old boy, so he just rattles on.

Shiro leans over to brush his knuckles against Adam’s. The blush on Adam’s face deepens.

“Today, you’ll be flying in duos. I’ve taken the liberty of randomly assigning you partners, so listen up.”

His heart sinks. Randomly assigned? He’s willing to bet money that between Adam’s precision technique in flight and Shiro’s impulsive and daring way of getting them out of sticky situations, they’d be practically unstoppable. Instead of flying with Adam, he’s going to be pawned off to Iverson’s choice.

Iverson begins, squinting his eyes to read his own horrible handwriting. Shiro knows it’s bad. The few times that Iverson’s taken the liberty of using a whiteboard and teaching them anything that isn’t trial by fire, he hasn’t even been able to read the board.

“Nuñez, Anderson. Waseb, Holt. Altea, Shirogane.” Iverson continues down the list, but Shiro is more concerned with his partner. _Allura_? Did she know about the pairings when she talked to him at breakfast this morning? And poor Adam is stuck with Matt Holt, who is known more for his ability to recode the simulator when it breaks than his actual ability to fly it. 

Shiro raises his gaze across the hall, to lock eyes with Allura. She’s standing, arms crossed, against the wall. When she catches his eye, she raises her eyebrows. It’s a challenge, somehow. Just like when the sophomore cadets race him on the obstacle course, when the professors are jogging on the track after class finishes and Shiro is out there, sweating alongside them, and when he reads books on foreign policy three grade levels above his own out of desperation to understand what’s going on in the news.

Iverson finishes off reading the names. “We’ll start with Nuñez and Anderson. The rest of you, to the viewing platform.”

There’s a room adjacent to the simulator, where the rest of the cadets can sit on overstuffed couches and rickety chairs and watch the view from inside the sim. Shiro files in behind Iverson, Adam trailing just behind him. When they take their customary spot on the back left couch (the black one), Allura slides in to join them.

“Hi boys,” she greets them, voice even. “Not to talk shop on the job, but Shiro and I should chat strategy.”

Shiro pauses. “Uh,” he says, like a coherent human being.

Adam handles it. He reaches down and picks up his bag from between his legs. “Good idea,” he says, a wry smile on the corners of his lips. “I’ll go find Matt.”

And then he’s gone, before Shiro’s had a chance to protest or a semblance of an idea what to say to make him stay. Allura is filing into his place, looking back at Adam’s retreating back and pulling out a beaten-up notebook from her bag. The words ‘FLIGHT SIM 2.0’ are written in black sharpie on the front of the yellow notebook. Allura flips through the paper before settling on a blank page and scribbling a title. ‘Duo Sim’ is written, in plain block titles, at the top.

“Ready to smash this?” she says, turning to Shiro. Adam, in the background, fades from view, and there are only Allura’s bright, determined eyes.

“Yeah,” Shiro replies. And then, steadier. “Let’s do this.”

They settle back to observe the video feed that’s broadcasted onto the walls of the small room.

Nuñez and Anderson’s problem is, well, everything. They really haven’t talked before, which is obvious from the fact that Anderson clearly knows who Nuñez is, but Nuñez has to ask for Anderson’s name again before the simulator officially starts. They both have very different flight styles, and not in a compatible way. Shiro watches the situation that they’re thrown in, which is reentering Earth’s atmosphere with the field of gravity active.

Shiro doesn’t think it’s a particularly difficult exercise – it’s one they’ve done dozens of times before – but the added component of flying with a copilot with wildly different ideas on how to handle the situation with you clearly seems to be throwing the first pair off.

By the time Nuñez and Anderson spill out of the simulator, arms crossed and still grumbling at each other, Shiro is officially nervous.

Iverson greets the duo with a crisp, “Simulation failed.” They slink off to separate corners of the lounge to their respective friends.

Adam and Matt go second. Adam looks up to meet his eyes before he leaves the room. Shiro shoots him a thumbs up and Adam gives him an easy smile before following Matt out of the room.

They settle in to the seats, buckling their seatbelts in easy unison. Adam adjusts his seat a notch forwards, and then cracks his knuckles.

“Ready for reentry?” Adam asks Matt as the simulator pod grows dark and the flickering screen with the earth rises before them.

“Ready,” Matt echoes, and they both reach for the autopilot switch at the same time. Matt looks at him for a moment, as if to challenge him. “I’ll copilot,” he says after a second of eye contact. Nuñez and Anderson hadn’t tried a chain of command, just defaulted to both having full control over the pod.

Adam nods, briskly, and goes to work.

Where Shiro is all about feeling when he flies, anticipating the next move of the shuttle rather than preparing for it, Adam is all process. The first thing he checks is oxygen levels, reading them off to Matt, who cross checks against his own and replies “check.” Adam moves on to altitude, speed, velocity, and temperature before apparently being satisfied and sizing up the challenge in front of him.

“Initiate forward thrusters,” Adam commands, and Matt yanks out the keyboard and begins working. A moment later, the simulator groans, and the forward thrusters engage. Adam grips the yoke and watches the temperature dial rise and the accelerator slow. He reaches for the throttle of the thrusters, slowly edging on more power to increase the angle. The pod dips, and Adam orders another command to Matt, who runs it quickly.

There isn’t a moment of disconnect. Adam clearly knows what he’s doing – as he should. He’s been studying flight theory for hours after class, usually when Shiro is lapping Mr. Yellot (the PE teacher), on the track. Shiro doesn’t need to study flight theory. It’s in his blood. He doesn’t need to study formation patterns, maneuvers, or landings. It’s just natural for him, in the same way that teaching others and doing physics is for Adam.

And then, Iverson tosses in a good handful of chaos. The craft’s left engine goes out mid-entry, and the shuttle goes into a spin. The simulator whips left, throwing Adam on the control board, where his fist slams into the throttle and thrusters all but go out. By the time Adam’s peeled himself off the dashboard, the craft is reaching dangerous rates of velocity, and Matt looks completely dumbfounded.

“Eject?” Matt offers, then looks at the temperature gauge, which is currently reaching around, oh, 3000 degrees Farenheight, and pales. “Maybe not.”

“We need to regain control,” Adam says, which is kind of obvious, but whatever. “We need to stabilize.”

_Burn out the counter-thrusters on the opposite engine and blast your downward thrusters to slow,_ Shiro thinks, wildly. It’s half stupid, because then they’ll have a _quarter_ of their functioning engines, but it’s the only solution he can think to slow the out-of-control vortex the simulation has forced them in to.

Adam is staring at the altitude gauge, watching the pod seemingly fall from space. And he chooses the safe option. “Pull out,” he says. “Pull _up_ , Matt.” Matt yanks up on the yoke, slamming the lever for altitude gain, and the pod switches direction with the push of the bottom thrusters and begins to soar. For a few terrifying moments, Shiro thinks their pod is going to splinter and they’re going to automatically fail the simulator, but then they’re blasting back into open space and outside of the entry point to the atmosphere.

The simulator grinds to a halt, hum of the motors quieting and cooling and screen flickering to black.

Adam visibly takes a huge breath, unbuckles his seatbelt, and leans over to rest his gloved hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Nice flying.”

It wasn’t perfect, but they worked well enough together, and they didn’t die. So basically, not bad.

When Adam and Matt reenter the room, a moment later, Iverson just stands in the front of the class, still clutching the damn clipboard and saying: “Reentry-point missed. You run out of oxygen shortly after, and with an unstable left engine, you are unable to generate the velocity to reenter the atmosphere. You perish shortly after. Failed simulation.”

The room takes a collective inhale. The smile on Adam’s face from saving the pod slips. Nuñez and Anderson’s failure was acceptable: neither of them were in the top 5 for class rankings and they’d died anyways. Adam is ranked high, and he’d done a decent job of pulling the mission out of danger. But still failed.

This isn’t the first time that Iverson’s increased the stakes. This isn’t a test about scrapping through. It’s about surviving, succeeding, doing what it would take in an actual mission to avoid mission failure and certain death.

“Let’s go.” Allura nudges Shiro’s arm and rises. Shiro follows shortly after, biting his lower lip as he passes a discouraged Adam.

Together, they follow Iverson out the door and into the simulator, which sits open, its gaping maw beckoning.

Shiro sits in the left chair, with Allura on his right. “Good luck, cadets.” Iverson says, as he presses the panel to close the back of the simulator behind them. “You’ll need it.”

And then it’s them, a few cameras, and a flickering screen.

Shiro buckles his seatbelt and hears Allura do the same beside him. He reaches for the yoke as the screen flickers to life, displaying the image of Earth’s surface below them.

“Run oxygen check,” Allura says from beside him. Shiro was already halfway to adjusting altitude but freezes at Allura’s words. “What?” Allura says, noticing Shiro’s hesitation and open stare. “We need to breathe, Shiro.”

And there it is again, the nickname, the title. The great cadet and fantastic pilot.

“Right,” Shiro says, and looks at the oxygen meter. “Oxygen concentration normal, 8 liters remaining in storage.”

Allura nods briskly. “What are the coordinates of the point of reentry?” Once again, something Shiro wouldn’t have checked, just edged the velocity until they were at a good reentry angle and speed and gone for it.

“Thirty-seven seconds to go,” Shiro replies. He cinches his hands around the yoke. “Autopilot off?”

Allura shoots him a stare. “Why? We should auto-pilot until last possible moment to keep our altitude consistent.”

Shiro swallows down a lump of frustration. “We should be prepared for complications.”

Allura gestures to the dashboard in front of them. “The last two groups took their pods off autopilot and ended up dead. Want to end up the same?”

He bites down a sharp remark and tightens his fingers around the cracked plastic. Shiro does not take off autopilot. A few more bated seconds pass, and Shiro checks the time on reentry again. “Nineteen.”

Allura just nods. “Disengage front thrusters. We can’t risk oxygen deprivation by missing the entry.”

_That’s not what I would have done_ , Shiro thinks, but he flicks off auto-pilot and disengages the front thrusters. He feels foolish stealing the show from her now, and besides, they haven’t been incinerated yet.

And then Iverson throws a wrench in it. Their altitude gauge flickers out, and then the manual steering does too. All they have the throttle and the three remaining thrusters. “Okay,” Allura says, trying to settle her nerves, even though Shiro can tell she’s starting to grow unsettled. “We’ll just manually control entry through throttle.”

This, Shiro agrees with. He looks to Allura, and she’s looking at him. Shiro looks down, to the large handle halfway up the dash.

“I’ll hold altitude steady,” Allura says. “You work the angle.”

Shiro nods. This is his element, the unknown. He leans forward, grabs the manual throttle, and begins increasing thrust to level out the angle. The pod continues being dragged in by Earth’s massive gravitational pull. Allura is slamming alarm lights and trying to keep the pod relatively stable. “Can you back off the rear thrusters?” Shiro grits, yanking his arm a centimeter back on the rusty throttle to avoid splintering into a million tiny pieces.

Allura fumbles for the switch. The delayed reaction time pushes the pod just a degree too far, and heat warnings begin flashing.

“Fuck,” Shiro swears, and Allura manages to laugh through the pressure.

He edges up on the throttle, and suddenly has a crazy idea. If he only has a few degree wiggle room to meet the atmosphere at the right angle to avoid combustion, he’s going to have to do it coming in faster than usual. In a moment of stupid, blind, confidence, he switches the fuel line to ‘max’ and pins the engines. Beside him, he hears Allura swear something colorful, but it’s too late to go back. Shiro risks a peek to his left, where the reentry timer is still counting down.

“Three,” Shiro warns, sweat beading on his palms.

“Two.” The red of the emergency lights flicker off the screen. For a split second, Earth is bathed in fire.

“One.” Simulation fire erupts on the screen, and for a moment, Shiro thinks he’s totally incinerated them, but then the blue of Earth grows closer, and the flames fade, and on the screen flashes a big green label that reads ‘Success.’

He rests back against the disgusting seats of the simulator and lets out a sigh. Allura coughs out one next to him.

She turns to him. “That was one hell of a maneuver, Shiro.” She’s grinning, a wicked smile on her lips. Shiro finds himself grinning back, high on the adrenaline of the flight and her praise.

When Iverson pulls him out of the simulator, there is no smile. They follow him into the observation room, where the rest of the class sits with bated breath.

Iverson analyzes the two of them, and then speaks. “Excellent flying. Allura, good calls on checking the stats, but your hesitation cost you time you can’t afford to lose. And Shiro, risky to burn fuel that way. If not for your stupid bravery, you’d have both been burnt to a crisp upon reentry,” he says, and then: “next.”

He departs with the next poor duo while Shiro stumbles back to the couch next to Adam and Allura rejoins her friends on the other side of the room. His palms still feel wet with sweat and his eyes burn from the flashing of the simulator. Adam doesn’t say anything when he settles onto the couch beside him, careful distance between their shoulders.

The rest of the day passes with a blur. Shiro fumbles through class, answers questions when he’s asked, smiles when he’s supposed to, and even manages to pass his pop poli-sci quiz.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Shiro has cut it close on passing the simulator. Hell, he’s even failed a few times. But none of those trials included another human life he was responsible for. He’s never pulled off a risky flight maneuver at the cost of not only his own life, but also someone else’s.

What if he’s a solo wonder? Doomed to fly beautifully on his own but damning the lives of others when he flies in a team. Hesitation is the difference between survival and death in the skies. Shiro still feels vaguely ill when his final class for the day gets out and he’s left standing at his Garrison-issue locker, staring mindlessly at his athletic clothes and trying to will himself to go running instead of curling up in a tiny ball on his bed and staring at the wall for a few hours.

Then, there’s a hand at his elbow. It’s Adam, watching Shiro with worried eyes. “You’ve been staring at your locker for a hot minute. Forget how to grab your track clothes?” He jokes, but the serious look in Adam’s eyes remains. Shiro swallows and closes the locker.

“Are you going to the library?” he asks, and Adam nods.

After class lets out, Adam usually heads down to the library to get a head start on readings. By the time Shiro has worked out and showered, he’s caught up with the day’s news and whatever obscene novel he’s in the middle of reading, and they do their homework together. Other students mill about, sometimes joining their study group, especially the night before exams, but it’s always at least Shiro and Adam.

“I think I’m going to skip studying tonight.” Shiro grips his books closer to his chest. “I’m not feeling great. Must have eaten something funny at lunch. I’m going to go lay down.” Shiro is a _really_ shitty liar. “You know?”

Adam’s left eyebrow is raised. “Oookay,” he says. “You know where to find me if you need me.”

Shiro gives him a tentative smile, but Adam doesn’t return it. “Later, I guess,” he says as Takshi starts backing away, turning finally and slipping into the mass of student in the bustling corridor.

When he reaches the end of the hallway, a sign with an arrow pointing to ‘dormitories’ directs Shiro to turn back the other way to return to his room.

He continues on, swiping his cadet badge on one of the doors and jogging down the stairwell until he’s reached ground level.

Outside is the track, and to the left, the tarmac, already sizzling in the spring heat. Heat lines rise from above the black asphalt surface, but that is the only movement. All the air traffic controllers and air personnel have gone home for the day.

Shiro takes a deep breath and presses the door open. Instead of turning right, to the track, like he always does, Shiro slinks along the side of the building, pressing himself between the concrete walls of the Garrison and the dying shrubs they’ve planted in a half-assed attempt to bring some life to the monstrous outpost.

No one notices Shiro; the instructors are too busy lacing up their shoes and sharing gossip after a long day of work. He moves like a shadow through the night until he’s at the edge of the tarmac, runway spilling out before him.

In the distance, about a hundred yards away, sits the first of the seven massive hangars that contain Garrison aircraft.

He looks back, once, to the track, where everyone is still so completely absorbed in their own activities that they don’t notice a lean boy with black hair and a Garrison cadet uniform bolting across the hot asphalt to the first hangar. The door closest to him has been left ajar, as if waiting for Shiro. He slips through the doorway and into the musty air, smelling of burnt rubber and gasoline. Shiro’s eyes adjust slowly to the darkness of the hanger compared to the blistering sunlight outside. When his vision returns, he looks out at the array of jets in front of him, each polished and parked, yellow blocks in front of the wheels and massive flag decals ornately painted.

F-4 Phantom II, green camouflage an intricate puzzle across its belly. F-10 Spectre, grey and sleek, the US Marine logo done up in red, white, and blue. Shiro wanders through row after row of aircraft, imagining what it would be like to fly one of them. Single cockpit jets that don’t require copilots. If he crashes, it’ll be to the sound of his own rattled breathing and the crackle of ground control through his helmet.

A fighter jet, streaking through a clear blue sky, clearing speeds of Mach 2. A shuttle, resting against the launch framework, a top-heavy beast ready to depart from Earth. A reentry pod, hurtling toward the Atlantic Ocean with its passengers desperately seeking control. Before him spills the metal and steel from which dreams are welded.

“Looking for something, cadet?” A voice comes from behind Shiro, who has stepped closer to a helicopter to examine the locking on the rotary blades.

He spins around, hands up, ready to see an angry security guard or protective pilot. He circles through the excuses he could use for being in a restricted area. He was just looking. His flight commander dropped his ID and wanted Shiro to look for it. He’s suffering from severe stress-induced amnesia and is totally lost, could they direct him to the cafeteria, please?

Instead, Iverson stands in front of him, still holding the damn clipboard. His head is half-cocked, and he doesn’t look angry at all, considering that his star cadet has snuck out of the Garrison building and practically broken in to a high-security hangar.

“Uh, no sir, sorry sir, just looking,” Shiro stammers out. “Sir.”

Iverson says nothing else, just sidles up next to Shiro and studies the helicopter.

“The SH-2 Seasprite.” Iverson says, gesturing to the massive machine in front of them. “It’s a bitch to fly.”

Shiro swallows, waiting for Iverson to continue.

“Why are you here, cadet?”

Shiro fumbles for an answer.

Because he failed the simulation? He’s done that before. Because Adam is being weird? Iverson doesn’t care. Because Allura, and everyone else, is treating him like he’s an idol and he doesn’t know how to handle it?

Shiro flies the simulator like his life depends on it, because someday, it will. Someday, the Cubans are actually going to proffer off a missile, and he’s going to be flying in formation over the Gulf of Mexico in a rattling Spitfire, a backpack nuke under his wing. And if it isn’t that, he’s going to be launched into space at 17,600 miles per hour at the tip of a rocket, pointing toward the stars.

Someday, Shiro is going to fly for real, and the life of his crew is going to depend on it. And the reckless, impulsive moves he pulls in the simulator are all fun and games until he’s thousands of feet above the desert sand, falling, falling, falling.

“I’m scared I’ll crash,” Shiro says, finally. He doesn’t look at Iverson. “I mean, not for my life, really, because I fly like I have nothing to lose and I don’t, really, outside of this. Have anything, I mean. But flying with a crew member? If I mess up, that’s on me. Everyone’s life is on me.”

What he doesn’t say is. _Everyone is watching me, too. Everyone is waiting for the moment the Golden boy falls through the cracks, because they’re hungry to replace him_.

Iverson shifts next to him. “Shirogane,” he says, voice gruff. “I want to show you something.”

They turn away from the Seasprite and Iverson leads them back toward the hangar doors. Shiro follows, watching his scuffed boots hit the unblemished concrete floor. Iverson leads him to a small object, covered by a ratty tarp. He yanks the tarp off in one sharp tug, and a cloud of dust rises, settling on the pristine floor around them.

Underneath is a battered red hovercraft, paint chipped from misuse and seat cracked. Shiro stares at the craft for a moment, and then back at Iverson.

“You want to get a feel for what flying _really_ feels like? You’ve beaten almost every record on the simulator so far. It’s in your blood, Shirogane, whether you want it to be or not. Fate has a funny way of choosing us regardless of if we’ve invited her or not.” He steps forward and claps a hand onto Shiro’s shoulder. Something hard and pointy jabs into his collarbone. Shiro tries not to flinch. “I better not be hearing about this at breakfast tomorrow, understand?”

Iverson drops his hand from Shiro’s shoulder and holds out a half-rusted key on a leather strap.

Shiro looks at the speeder, and then back at Iverson. He reaches for the key.

“Understood, sir,” he says, throat feeling like sandpaper. Iverson gives him a curt nod and heads for the doors.

And then Shiro is alone, standing in the hangar of the United States Garrison’s finest aircraft, holding the keys to a shitty speeder that Iverson’s entrusted him with because he’s some kind of flying prodigy.

Iverson’s words ring through his ears. _‘Fate has a funny way of choosing us_ .’ He tightens his grip on the key, so tight that the serrated edge bites into the flesh of his palm. _‘Regardless of if we’ve invited her or not.’_ Shiro did not choose his destiny. He looked to the stars, and the stars looked back, and simply that was enough. His father, pointing out the constellations on a rare camping trip. Walking home late at night from the convenience store to pick up beef jerky for dinner. Signing the ‘declaration of admission’ forms under a buzzing lightbulb in his cramped room in his foster family’s house.

Shiro did not invite fate. But now, staring at the speeder, sitting in the shadow of planes built for war and shuttles built for space exploration, all illuminated by the afternoon sunlight streaming through a slight crack in the maw of the hangar doors, Shiro welcomes fate, whatever she may have planned.

* * *

“…gravitational pull would send the pod rocketing into a crater – Takashi, are you even listening?” Adam’s voice cuts through Shiro’s thoughts, and he drops his pencil, startled.

Adam is leaning across the table to study him, brown hair dipping into his eyes, holding his aerodynamic physics homework in one hand and a rather large map in the other.

“Sorry,” Shiro apologizes, mind still tracing back to the speeder sitting in the hangar and Iverson’s words. “Spacing out.”

Adam settles back in the rickety library chair. “Spaced out, huh?” he says, a wry smile on his face. “Well, space cadet, did you figure out number two on Carlton’s homework?”

Shiro looks down to his own copy of the homework in front of him, which is blank save for Shiro’s code scribbled in the upper right-hand corner. SHIRO, all caps, stares back unhelpfully.

They’re studying after their respective activities, as usual, except Shiro can’t get himself to think of anything but what the open air of the desert might feel like against his chapped lips, what the rush of the wind would feel like in his hair.

“Uh.” Shiro goes to make up some lame excuse about running too hard on the track or something, but a shadow falls over the table and saves him. Adam’s face falls for half a second when he registers the view, but quickly schools his face into a pleasant façade.

Allura Altea’s black hair bounces around her shoulders and piles into the seat next to Shiro. “I’m not sure about Shiro, but I made it through number five until my brain broke.” She laughs a self-deprecating ‘ha.’ “Fuck gravitational velocity.”

She’s changed out of her Garrison uniform, opting instead for a plain button-down and slacks. Shiro rarely sees anyone but Adam outside of uniform, and that’s mostly because they spend late nights like these working together and the uniforms are terribly uncomfortable.

It isn’t particularly unusual for students to come and study with Shiro and Adam, per se, but it’s usually before an exam, when everyone begs Adam to teach them statistical hypothesis and Ms. Carter drags out a mobile chalkboard for them to squabble over. There is no exam tomorrow. The library is mostly empty, just a few staff members parsed out across the old chairs, thumbing through news articles and books. So yeah. It’s weird that Allura is here, now, sitting at their table, during their ritual, like she’s always been a part of it.

Adam looks across to the table to catch Shiro’s eyes. He raises an eyebrow to ask ‘her?’ and Shiro just blinks back. He’s caught off guard by Allura’s intrusion. Adam takes things into his own hands with a quick shake of his head. “I finished everything but the second problem,” he tells Allura, pushing his paper toward her. “Any idea how to calculate gravitational velocity without weight?”

It’s an invitation, an opening, in a place where Shiro knows Adam doesn’t actually want Allura to be. His heart tugs, unprompted, as Allura and Adam lean across the table to compare notes.

Allura seems relieved that they haven’t immediately ousted her and pulls Adam’s paper toward her own. It reminds Shiro of a god accepting an offering at an altar. “Oh,” she says, after a moment of looking at Adam’s wild scribbles that she’s miraculously deciphered. “You have to determine the weight based on velocity and pressure.” She digs through her notebook for a moment before settling on a page of carefully transcribed notes and points to a highlighted formula. “Use this.”

Adam follows her eyesight and glances over her notes, then the problem, then her notes again. He runs a hand through his unruly hair and chuckles. “Obviously. You don’t need weight when you have Newton’s law of gravitation.” He scrawls a note next to problem two, and starts working on it, but Allura twirls her pencil between her fingers and keeps speaking.

“Did you figure out five?” she asks, peering at Adam’s illegible script.

“Oh, yeah,” Adam says, glancing back up. “I can explain it, if you want?”

Allura nods. “So, I’m stuck here.” She points to her paper.

Shiro is officially lost. He looks down to his own paper, where he’s circled one word in the problem three times, graphite smearing across the page. He looks back up, where Adam and Allura have transitioned into a lively discussion about how much they love gravitational physics calculations or something equally terrible. He likes flying, where everything is based on instinct and not how many formulas he can cram in his brain the night before a test.

But watching Adam like this, eyes alight with excitement over _physics_ , of all subjects, is entrancing. It’s far more interesting then his worksheet. The way he’s halfway bent over the table, trying to point something obscure out in Allura’s notes to her, laughing when she slams her face into the table with a groan and an “of course it was that.”

_Cute._ Shiro thinks. _He looks cute like this._

And this is, of course, where Shiro’s gay crisis intensifies. Adam has been his best friend for the last six months. They’ve spent countless hours pouring over their studies in the library, comparing interesting news stories while perched in overstuffed chairs or doing homework. Their morning routine in the cafeteria, where Adam debriefs Shiro on the news while he halfheartedly chokes down some oatmeal and drinks black coffee in a feeble attempt to keep himself from falling asleep in first period. The late nights they spent in each other’s rooms, talking about their families and their hometowns, their plans for the future.

And now, Shiro is on the cusp of ruining it all. Staring at Adam, all tan skin and lean arms, stretched across a rickety library table to help a fellow student that he’s never really taken a liking to, Shiro _wants_. He wants to reach across the table and tangle his fingers with Adam’s. He wants to brush his curly hair out of his eyes in casual conversation, push his glasses higher up his nose. He wants to be the first person that Adam tells exciting news to, and he wants Adam to be his first in return.

The year is 1962. The United States is at war with the Soviet Union, except no one really wants to say it. The Garrison is training cadets to be launched into space to beat the Russians. Physics is pretty much impossible.

Shiro has a crush on his best friend.

These are just the facts.

* * *

Shiro’s history professor is up there with ‘most boring people he’s ever met.’ He actually manages to make history boring, which is a feat given that its Shiro’s favorite subject outside of flight theory. He’s rapping his yardstick against the vague area of the Middle East while monotonously droning on. Shiro keeps doodling in the margins of his notebook and occasionally looking up to keep the guise of interest.

Adam is sitting next to him, uncharacteristically still with his chin propped up on his arm. His pen is lax in his fingertips, ballpoint pressing an ink splotch on the lined paper.

“The Suez Crisis was a massive blunder for British and French foreign policy,” Mr. Jones continues. “The loss of the Suez Canal has only led to increasing Soviet influence and destabilization of the region. Can anyone tell me why this is an issue for the United States?”

He turns around for the first time in like, an hour, to survey the class. Shiro brings his gaze up from his notes, where he’s been attempting to sketch a scale model of the solar system (unsuccessfully). The class is silent, save for the shifting of teenage bodies in creaky plastic chairs as they try and make themselves invisible to avoid being called on.

Adam is almost always the first one to answer. He’s usually sitting back in his seat, twirling his pen between his fingers and answering Jones’ questions like they’re a challenge aimed directly at him. But today, he remains turned away from Shiro, head still resting on his palm and staring blankly in the direction of the board.

Mr. Jones notices Adam’s unusual silence. Most classes, he’s looking everywhere but at Adam’s half raised hand and cocky ‘pick me’ smirk. He only calls on Adam begrudgingly, when he’s unable to drag an answer out of anyone else in the class.

“Mr. Waseb?” Jones calls. “Do you have any input?”

Adam doesn’t move, and a half second later, Shiro realizes it’s because he’s _asleep_. His chest rises and falls subtly under the starch of his uniform as he takes slow, deep breaths. He can’t see Adam’s face, but the ink from his pen is still bleeding onto his paper and slowly taking over the few notes that Adam managed to jot down before drifting off.

Shiro apologizes mentally, then kicks Adam pretty hard in the shins from his desk.

Adam jolts awake, pen tumbling from his hand and glasses falling down on his nose. The entire class is staring, including Mr. Jones, who has his arms crossed and his tiny beady eyes narrowed.

“Um,” Adam says, taking note of the entire room’s eyes focused on him. “Oops?”

“Oops indeed,” Mr. Jones reprimands. “It’ll do you well to stay awake during lecture next time. I’ll see your Friday afternoon for detention.”

Adam’s cheeks color with embarrassment as he shrinks lower in his desk, still blinking sleep out of his eyes. Shiro can feel the shame radiating off of his skin from five feet away.

Shiro has ended up in detention a few times – mainly for sneaking out his room after curfew to sneak in some practice on the simulator. The hall monitors are almost used to finding him slipping out of the creaky classroom door with sweat on his brow and hands shaky from adrenaline. Shiro knows which of them will let him off scot-free and which will send him to clean underneath desks for an hour on a perfectly good Friday afternoon. Tuesdays and Sundays are the best days to sneak out.

But Adam? Almost never gets in trouble, and not because he’s afraid of breaking the rules. Where Shiro breaks rules on a whim, tossing care to the wind on the wings of impulse, Adam is clever about the ways he sneaks around the system. When Shiro wanted to break into the records room, it was Adam who slipped the key off the belt of the janitor while claiming to have been locked out of his room. It was Adam who found the guard schedule, and it was Adam who figured out the code words on classified files and pieced together the story that the Garrison had and was unwilling to tell. Shiro may be the executioner, but Adam is the mastermind that keeps him from getting caught.

It’s moments like those that Shiro remembers that while both of them are on scholarship, only one of them is really allowed to make mistakes.

“Sorry, sir,” Adam replies, “it won’t happen again.”

Jones opens his mouth, like he has something more to say, but he’s cut off by the swift buzz of the intercom, signaling the end of class. Adam practically leaps out of his seat, not even waiting for Shiro, and shoves his notebook in his bag before darting for the door. By the time Shiro has stumbled out of his seat and into the hallway, Adam has his head pressed against the cool metal of the door of his locker.

“Hey,” Shiro says softly, resisting the urge to run his fingers along the nape of Adam’s exposed neck. “Are you okay?”

Adam nods, pulling back to turn the dial on the locker. “Just tired, that’s all.” He opens the flimsy door and tosses his notebook inside, pulling out his physics textbook. “And didn’t have my coffee this morning.”

Which is odd, because Adam had walked Shiro back to his dorm room after studying last night, just before curfew, hip-checking him around the corners of the hallways and teasing him about Allura. Shiro hadn’t known how to deflect Adam’s jokes about how Allura had a _cruuuush_ on him, mainly because he didn’t want to have to explain how ‘oh, no, I don’t like Allura, actually I think I have a big fat gay crush on you!’ was actually the truth. So he’d laughed it off, said goodnight, and threw himself into bed, only to stare at his ceiling for the better part of the night while his stomach wound itself into knots over the thought of Adam.

The worst part of having a crush, Shiro has decided, is the part where it’s terrifying. Terrifying because if you never act on it, you’ll always think you may have missed the change. Even more terrifying because he’s what – gay? - in a military academy in the middle of the 1960s while the specter of the invisible homosexual, like the specter of the invisible communist, lingers in the periphery. He’s an abomination to the American way of life. And even if Adam doesn’t care if he’s gay – which he doesn’t think Adam will, because he’s read _Giovanni’s Room_ half a dozen times and pinned an article about New York City Pride onto the corkboard of his room – everyone else will. Shiro is the golden boy of the garrison. The soon-to-be-pride of the United States space exploration program. He’s going to meet with the president, and the president will ask if he knows any pretty girls, and he’ll laugh while Allura blushes off-screen, except it’ll be brown eyes, not blue, that he’s picturing.

Liking Adam is a daydream. A recurring daydream that Shiro can’t seem to shake, especially in the quiet moments where it’s just the two of them, pushing articles across the library tables or sitting on Shiro’s bed and playing cards. It’s the moments where Adam destroys their entire class in a game of poker because his _akh_ taught him how to count cards before he left for the Garrison, because the world liked to take advantage of clever brown boys in a white man’s world, and Adam had to know how to cheat them out of something too. It’s the moments where Adam burns bright, smart, and blindingly kind that Shiro can’t shake, no matter how hard he stares at the curve of Allura’s waist and prays that he’ll wake up in love with her tomorrow.

And it is because Shiro is so stupidly, hopelessly head over heels for Adam that he knows that something is up. He knows him well enough to know that Adam never falls asleep in class, because Adam fought tooth and nail to get accepted and he wouldn’t risk his place or scholarship by slacking off.

“Did you stay up studying late?” Shiro presses. With exams approaching and first year ending, Shiro knows that the pressure is on. But they studied for hours yesterday, until he could only think in gravitational laws while Adam breezed through the remainder of his own work.

Adam shrugs. “Kind of.” He slams the locker closed. When he turns to Shiro, there are bags under his eyes.

Shiro can’t help himself. “Kind of? You kind of look like shit, honestly.” He winces as soon as the words leave his mouth, especially when Adam’s mouth narrows into a hard line. “Sorry, I-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Adam says quickly, tone teetering between frustrated and exhausted. He reaches up to rub his eyes under his glasses and exhales a breath. “Sorry for snapping at you. Like I said, I’m just tired.”

“I can cover for you in physics if you want to go see the nurse,” Shiro offers. “I’ll even try and take half decent notes, just for you.” The corners of Adam’s lips lift slightly.

“Nah, like I’d trust you to do that. We all know you’d be barely scraping by the minimum academic GPA if it wasn’t for me.” And oh, there is Adam’s teasing lilt and way that he pokes holes in Shiro’s façade.

He rolls his eyes. “I’m good at everything but physics, cut me some slack. We can’t all be super geniuses like you.”

“And we all can’t be the best pilot of our generation,” Adam shoots back, but it’s lighthearted now. “You work for your grade in physics, I work for a spot in the pilot program. It’s the law of equivalent exchange.” He slams the locker door closed and leans his shoulder against it, grinning softly. There are still dark circles under his eyes and his hair is tousled in the way that looks less ‘runway’ and more ‘I combed my hair with my fingers while running to class.’ Shiro finds himself caught off guard at how, even like this, a little moody and unkempt, he still finds Adam stunning. Shiro swallows carefully.

_Don’t have a big gay episode right now, dumbass_ , he tells himself. Adam’s lips are moving. Shiro is trying not to jump his bones.

“I was taking test runs in the simulator,” Adam tells him. “Gotta give you some competition, right?”

And here, Adam is smiling and joking in the hallway, but Shiro has seen the way he grits his teeth and tightens his fists around the yoke of the simulator. Shiro has watched him read flight manual after flight manual, steal files on failed missions just to study pilot mistakes. The last thing that Adam wants to do is fail, and where he can study for a test and pass every time, the simulator throws in a whole different level of unexpected.

Once, a couple of months ago, Shiro had asked Adam that out of every Garrison track, he’d chosen pilot. Why not scientist, or engineer, or teacher? Why take risks flying when Adam liked the confidence of a formula behind him, or a practiced equation that gave him the right answer one hundred percent of the time? Adam looked at him oddly, and then paused to think for a moment, sitting on Shiro’s floor and working on that day’s NYT crossword.

“I think,” Adam had said, whilst leaning back to look Shiro in the eyes. “Life is just a calculated risk that we take one hundred percent of the time.” Then he paused, as if to process the weight of his own words.

“Wow,” Shiro had replied. “That’s deep.”

Adam threw his pencil at Shiro’s head. “Oh, shut up. First of all, I once heard you say that you flew so impulsively because you had nothing to prove to anyone except yourself, which meant that you had everything to prove. So don’t start on that philosophical bullshit with me. Second, fuck the Russians.” Adam had a dirty grin in his mouth, the kind that forecasted trouble. “Third, I want to be the first man on the moon.”

They’re not in Shiro’s bedroom anymore, they’re against the lockers of a quickly-emptying hallway as students scatter to class. Shiro flies like hell because it’s the first thing he’s managed to hold on to, and Adam sticks with it because it’s the calculated risk he’s facing head-on.

“We should fly together,” Shiro bursts out brazenly. “Duo test the simulator.”

It makes sense. For Shiro’s impulse, there is Adam’s method. For Adam’s process, there is Shiro’s instinct. Two completely different styles of flying that somehow, Shiro knows will work.

Adam blinks at him, caught off-guard. “What?”

“You and me,” Shiro repeats. “Let’s sneak out. Maybe not tonight, maybe when you’ve gotten more than three hours of sleep and try the simulator together. I’ll teach you how to loosen up on the controls and you can whack me with the flight manual when I ignore all the flashing red lights and explode my shuttle.” He’s grinning, because flying is tied for things he likes best about the Garrison, and he wants to share that with his best friend.

Adam is the other thing, of course. 

“Okay,” Adam says. He laughs, a short exhale of breath. “I mean, sure. Why not?”

And then he looks up, through the glasses that always slide down his nose when he’s reading and fog up when he’s flying (Shiro knows this because he knows details in all the wrong places – he can tell which commander is approaching by the slap of their boots around the corner, he knows what wires to cross to short out the lock on the records room, he knows all the tiny, insignificant details about Adam that he tells himself and no one else) and smiles almost shyly at Shiro.

He swears that his heart misses a beat. He’s developed arrhythmia around Adam, heart skipping beats like kids skipping rope on the playground.

“Uh, nice,” Shiro fumbles, feeling his cheeks heat up. Why is he embarrassed? Why is he blushing? Oh my god, he looks like an idiot. “I’m going to.” Shiro waves vaguely down the hall. “Go to class now?”

Adam is still smiling. “Cool,” he tells Shiro, straightening from his post on the lockers and turning to head down the hallway. “See you later then, space cadet.”

Shiro’s heart skips like, four beats.

Adam retreats down the hallway, hurrying toward his next class.

The bell rings overhead, signaling the start of the next period.

When Shiro skids into his English class, one of the only classes he doesn’t have with Adam, he’s still running the nickname ‘space cadet’ through his mouth like a candy-striped jawbreaker. He loves the way that Adam’s attention tastes in his mouth. It isn’t until he sits down and their professor instructs them to open their copies of The Great Gatsby to page eighty-seven, please, that Shiro realizes that he never went to his locker, too busy thinking about Adam’s soft smile to form any other rational thought.

“Professor Allen?” Shiro raises his hand. “Can I go to my locker to get my book?”

She gives him the same insufferable look that Shiro’s gotten from a hundred teachers in five different states. He blushes, ducks his head, and bolts back down the hallway.

* * *

It's around one in the morning when Shiro gets the knock. He sits bolt upright in bed, slamming his fist into the cord for the dim bedside lamp to illuminate the room. The knock comes again. A steady knock, long pause, knock, short pause, knock, long pause, then silence. Shiro pushes himself out of bed, shivering as the warm air hits his sweaty arms. He pushes at the edge of the door, peering out into the darkness of the hallway. Darkness, except for one thing. A boy, in a black t-shirt and jeans, shoving against Shiro’s chest and pushing into his room.

“Jesus, let me in,” Adam hisses as he closes the door behind the two of them. He fumbles to a stop, and Shiro finds himself pressed against Adam, against the door. Shiro’s hair is still flying in every direction from sleep, his boxers falling lower and lower on his hipbones, old t shirt draping off his shoulders. Adam is panting against him, eyes alight, cheeks flushed. His lips are stained red, and Shiro finds himself staring. He feels frozen, like this is one of those moments he dreams about before he falls asleep, Adam tumbling into his arms and declaring his love. Except instead of crying out ‘Takashi, I love you!’ he says;

“Takashi, move!” He slips out from under Shiro, charging to Shiro’s drawers and ripping them open. “Get dressed.”

Shiro is still kind of frozen, half stunned at the intrusion and the other half burning fierce where Adam’s hands has brushed his shoulders as he’d darted past Shiro.

Adam throws a pair of pants at Shiro, which hit him on the back of the head and stun him into action. He starts tugging on the pants, fumbling as he looks up at Adam, who is turned around, hunting for a shirt that isn’t horrific (Shiro got the hand-me-downs! He has a lot of mustard brown, okay?).

“What’s going on?” he pants, buttoning his pants while hopping leg to leg. “You’re riled up.”

“You told me that you’d fly the simulator with me.” Adam turns around and tosses him a grey t-shirt that Shiro shoved to the bottom of his drawer because he got a nasty oil stain on it and he’s been too afraid to wash it out in fear that it will spread to the other clothes. The woes of responsibility. “I’m cashing in.”

“Tonight?” Shiro hisses back. “Now?” He tugs the shirt on and reaches for his boots, tipped against the doorframe.

“You know that the night watch has their Friday night poker games from one to three. This is the best shot we’re going to have for weeks, once finals get serious.”

Solid logic. Shiro was the one who suggested that they break out, back in their second month of school, and inspired Adam to figure out all the guard habits.

He double knots his shoes, just in case, and shoves his Garrison ID into his back pocket. “Okay,” Shiro says, straightening up and letting a soft grin spread over his face. Adam seems startled that he’s agreed to go this easily, blinking rapidly when Shiro’s eyes meet his. “Wheels up.”

They slip down the hallways, darting around corners and into shadows. A few left turns, up a staircase, through a pair of ‘supposedly locked’ doors that every single cadet knows how to break into, and lead you to a faded orange sign next to a door reading “Simulator Room A.”

No one knows what it’s named ‘Room A’ because there aren’t any other simulators. Sometimes, Shiro wonders if it was part of the facilities’ plan before the war. To make a center to train actual students, pilots, engineers, and not soldiers in a war of projection. Russia projects into Iran, the United States projects into Japan, both project kids with their sleeves still pushed into space. First one to the moon without blowing up wins!

In a different universe, Shiro thinks bitterly, we’re the ones who are here for the good of humanity and scientific exploration.

They power up the simulator, overriding the instructor controls with a strategically placed hairpin (pretty much common knowledge), rap in the code for a partner reentry exercise (which they know because Adam read the entire machine manual), and buckle up.

Shiro sits in the left seat and slowly settles his hands on the yoke. Adam, beside him, takes a deep breath, and then grasps the control a beat after Shiro. Slowly, the black screen before them flickers to life, static buzzes of light simulating stars while the Earth grows in distance between them. He flicks on his comm link and gives an experimental tug on the yoke. “Reentry time of oh-thirty-seven,” Shiro recites from the clock in the lower right corner.

“Pressure holding steady,” Adam says a moment later. “How’s it feel?”

“Good enough to take it off manual reentry.” Shiro grins through his words. “I’m ready for a challenge.”

Beside him, Adam barks a laugh. He leans to the side, rotating to the locking mechanism to the right side of the craft. “Detaching boosters.”

“WHAT!” Shiro finds himself screeching, but it’s too late. Adam is already halfway through flipping the lock to detach the heavyweight boosters that have pushed them through the upper portions of the Earth’s atmosphere. He raises an eyebrow.

“You’re a great pilot Shiro, and don’t take this the wrong way, but the extra twelve-thousand-something extra pounds the boosters add don’t do your flying any favors.” Adam slams the release on the lock the rest of the way. With a sharp jolt, the simulator shivers, and a large red alert flashes onto the screen, reading THRUSHER 009 DETACHED. When Shiro looks at Adam with his mouth parted in a perfect o, Adam just shrugs and returns to the control. “Oops.”

“How are we going to obtain velocity to avoid missing the angle of reentry and having our craft torn to shreds from thousands of pounds of pressure and incinerating temperatures?” Shiro pants, somehow still half smiling. Adam has thrown a wrench in his main strategy – fly himself into a problem, and then climb his way out of it. He’s thrown the wrench that pushes Shiro to be greater, more creative, more practiced than any pilot ever before him, simply because Adam is willing to be _that fucking insane_ too. Adam tosses the wrench in the original plan and makes a better one with seconds to spare.

“Seriously, do you ever pay attention in physics?” Adam cackles, snapping the switch to open the stabilizers. “Adjust angle. The gravitational pull will increase the speed. We should make it.”

“Then why don’t we _normally do it like this_ ,” Shiro hisses, scrabbling to stabilize the angle. “If it’s so much better.”

“Because you have to be absolutely perfect, or we’re going to be torn apart by the atmosphere of our home.”

_Great_ , Shiro thinks, _I don’t only get to kill Allura, but also my best friend. Excellent!_

“One hundred and seventeen point five,” Adam rattles off next to him. “Think you can hold her at that for the next,” he checks the timer, “twenty-three seconds?”

There is a moment where Shiro wonders if he should just slam the ‘end simulator’ button. He’s not going to be able to hold a near-impossible angle on a massive, unwieldy craft while watching Adam out of the corner of his eye. Being reminded of Adam’s mortality.

And then, his hands tighten around the Y of the yoke. He shifts in his seat, once, and rolls his neck. He checks the angle gauge. He’s at one-sixteen. “Okay,” Shiro finds himself saying, and his blood pressure is lowering. His heartbeat swooshes in his ear, but it’s a steady rhythm, now. He’s looking through a scope. “Nearing one-seventeen.”

“I’ll take boosters. You hold the panel angle.” Adam is hitting a few different lights and then his control loosens. He presses slightly left, and the angle gauge jumps to one-eighteen. Adam watches it rise and slowly eases back. They even out, hovering perfectly halfway between seventeen and eighteen. “Hold.”

Shiro’s knuckles are white as the screen begins to dissolve from the stars to the white-hot heat of the Earth’s atmosphere. Suddenly, they’re no longer in a simulator, and the rattling isn’t the springs under the machine, but seated side by side in an Apollo vessel, working in perfect, harmonious, eccentric sync.

Sixteen.

The craft wavers hard to the left. Slowly, Shiro takes the nose of the craft right. Adam applies counterbalance instantly, changing the trajectory instead of the angle. They let off at the exact same moment, rattling slightly ceasing. Shiro doesn’t have time to compliment Adam.

Ten.

It rattles harder. They’re reaching the critical point of reentry, where the pressure is the highest. Where the stakes are highest.

Seven.

The rattling is deafening. It didn’t feel like this during the first simulation, where Shiro and Allura had been too out-of-sync to craft a plan that would actually save their lives. That had felt fake, like another attempt under the eyes of all his peers. A test. Here, there are no tests. It is do or die, and there is no ‘try.’ There is no audience. It’s Shiro and Adam, breathing in tandem while they hold twin controls to an ancient machine under their bloodied knuckles.

Three.

In the moments before they either survive in blinding glory or are literally burnt to a crisp, Shiro risks a peek out of the corner of his eye to Adam. He’s still grinning, lip furled at the challenge, dark shadows under his eyes erased with adrenaline. He looks like he’s living.

Shiro vows to never ask again why Adam chose the flight path. Watching him here, in his element, game for the craziest solution that might just work, Shiro realizes that he’s just as much of a natural as a pilot as Shiro, just in a different way. Where Shiro is all impulse and feel, Adam knows the tricks to slip around the backdoor of science.

Zero.

The rattling stops, and the simulator flies freely for the first time since the code had been punched in. The beeping buttons on the dash all fall quiet.

On the screen, green letters flash across the blue of the Pacific Ocean.

SIMULATION COMPLETE.

Shiro stares in awe for a moment, his breath hollow.

Adam speaks for both of them when he says: “Holy shit, we actually did it.”

They lock up slowly, barely daring to breathe too loudly in fear that the guards will be off their poker night early as they skitter back toward the first-year cadet barracks. Tumbling around the final corner to Shiro’s room, they come to a stuttering halt at the sight of a figure striding down the hallway toward them. 

“Shiro?” Tthe figure asks, and then steps into the dim light of the emergency bulb. The faint light makes her dark skin look waxy and hollow.

“Allura?” Shiro chokes out, stepping out of the shadows with Adam close behind. “What are you doing here?”

She tenses, looking from side to side quickly. “Uh,” she says, hands shoved deep into her pockets. “Studying?”

“At three in the morning?” Adam asks, eyes narrowed. “Your room is a couple of doors down. And you don’t have any books.”

Allura looks panicked. “It’s uh, a-”

She’s cut off by the sound of boots coming from down the hallway. The duo looks at Allura, and she looks back at them. “Later,” Allura hisses, voice a nervous promise, before she slips off down the hallway that Adam and Shiro had just come from. They stand for a moment, startled into inaction, before Adam recovers his wits, reaches into Shiro’s back pocket to pluck his ID card, swipes the card on Shiro’s room, and shoves them both inside.

Shiro find himself thinking, alarmed, that it’s the second time tonight Adam has shoved himself into Shiro’s room. He’s starting to permeate everything that Shiro does, and he’s startled by it. Looking at Adam, flopping backwards onto his bed and tossing Shiro’s ID onto his nightstand, holding himself from breaking out in laughter, he finds it hard to breathe.

“Wow,” Adam says, looking to Shiro with a toothy grin. “We really did just sneak out, kick ass on the simulator mission that made us both feel like shit, run into Allura who was sneaking out, avoid the night guards, and successfully make it back to your room. We’re good, space cadet. We’re really good.”

Shiro groans and toes off his boots before flopping into bed next to Adam. “I can’t believe you talked me into doing that.”

“Hey.” Adam shoves Shiro’s shoulder. “You seemed plenty excited too, if my memory serves me well.”

“Your memory is shit. You forgot my birthday,” Shiro shoots back.

“Oh fuck you, the only reason I missed it was because you told me a _fake one_ , you dick.”

They both break into laughter, bodies shaking in unison as the glee of being young and wild settles into their necks and chests.

_It’s just youth_ , says Shiro’s brain. But here, turning to look at the boy who is glimmering in the lamplight before him, laying on Shiro’s sleep-wrinkled sheets with a glint in his eye, another part of Shiro’s brain says differently. _It’s more than that. It’s love, too._

* * *

Shiro stands in the glow of the setting sun, back to the open hangar doors, keys to the speeder in one hand and the other holding the half-melted handlebars.

Iverson had told him that he could take it out whenever he wanted, as long as he didn’t show it off to the other cadets. He’s swapped his Garrison uniform for a pair of black flight pants and an oversized jacket he found in the lost and found. Neither fits him very well. The pants are approximately three sizes too large and the jacket’s left sleeve is nearly torn off. But when he pulls a helmet over his messy black hair and straddles the seat, he feels like an entirely different person.

He takes a deep breath and turns the key. The speeder rumbles cantankerously before turning over. The seat rattles underneath him, a steady purr that is so much more alive-feeling than the mechanical tick of the simulator.

His mind turns to flying the simulator last night with Adam. How in sync they were, how Adam was not only willing to go along with Shiro’s crazy plans, but willing to instigate them himself. The wild thrill of flying alongside his best friend, of defeating a simulator exercise that they’d both previously had their asses handed to them during.

The speeder pulls out of the hangar and into the haze of sunset over the Sonoran desert. The Garrison is quiet, all the pilots and engineers that are usually milling around the tarmac inside to eat dinner. Even the track is devoid of its usual joggers, everyone pushed inside by the hundred degree heat. The scorch of the May heat has left Shiro alone in the wasteland.

He pulls out onto the main runway, watching the end of the pavement disappear in a hazy mirage. Air standing in layers of different density above the simmering pavement, the road blurs into the mountains in the distance. Shiro pulls his goggles down, takes a deep breath, and pins the throttle.

The speeder may be the first real craft that Shiro’s ever flown, but he handles it like it’s the hundredth. The tail squirrels left at the sudden takeoff. Shiro eases off the gas until the speeder is straight, and then backs the speed back on. He’s shooting off down the pavement in an instant, yellow dashed guidelines blurring into one solid line as Shiro whoops and blitzes down the tarmac.

He hits the end of the pavement quickly, and with a quick glance back over his shoulder, shoots off into the desert sand.

The first couple hundred feet are just gravel, the speeder continuing to pick up speed as the hulking Garrison goes from a massive building to his right to a peripheral object. He hits open sand, dodging past sagebrush and yucca trees, and everything behind him slips away.

It’s like flying the simulator, except the wind in his face is warm and dry, the purr of the motor isn’t from old tech straining to stay alive, and the rattling under his seat is from motion. He streaks toward the purple mountains and away from the setting sun, watching his shadow grow long in front of him as he drives with no direction other than ‘away.’

Everything disappears behind him. Worries about exams, the looming presidential visit that Shiro is still slated to speak at, Allura’s increasingly unsettling behavior, Adam’s entry into all of Shiro’s thoughts. They all blow away, grains of sand torn up by the craft.

When Shiro finally brings the heaving speeder to a stop and climbs to the top of an outcropping of rocks, he watches the sun dip completely below the horizon line as the world grows dark. It doesn’t take long for night to fall, and in the relative emptiness of the desert, the stars bloom in the sky. Shiro has never seen stars like this before, not back in Oregon with his foster family, where the city was always too close and the light pollution too strong, and not when he was a kid with his dad, laying in the back of a pickup truck and squinting to find the North star.

The whole sky stares down at him, beckoning. Satellites traipse by, and Shiro imagines the Soviets scanning US territories for military activity and finding a boy sprawled out on the rocks miles outside the Garrison. What would they think, that he’d defected? Rationally, he knows that satellite images aren’t clear enough to make him out, especially in his dark clothing and black hair, but he still laughs at the thought.

_Don’t underestimate me_ , Shiro thinks, as he follows the line of another satellite streaking across the sky. _I’ll be up there someday_.

The drive back is slow. Before Shiro figures out that the speeder will whack its way through most of the small brush and rocks, he’s weaving painstakingly through the dark desert landscape without any headlights. He makes a mental note to steal a flashlight and some duct tape to create makeshift headlights. By the time he’s pulled the speeder back into the hangar and closed the doors behind him, dinner has long since ended and he’s nearing curfew.

Slipping back inside the Garrison doors and running fingers through his wind-whipped hair, Shiro tries his hardest to look anything but guilty. He heads towards his room, hoping to take a shower, do some reading, and avoid all human contact that will ask him why he’s trying to stifle an ear-to-ear grin.

But in his rush of excitement about flying the speeder and getting out of the concrete Garrison walls, he forgets about one main, nosey, part of the equation.

“Where the _fuck_ have you been?” a voice hisses, grabbing at the sleeves of Shiro’s ripped jacket and pulling him into one of the dorm rooms. Shiro stumbles, turning guiltily to look at Adam. He’s released Shiro’s sleeve in lieu of crossing his arms and glaring. “You said you were going for a run _three hours ago_ and you never came back.”

“Uh.” Shiro scrambles for an excuse. “I got lost?”

Adam blinks. Shiro winces.

“Really, really lost?” he offers.

Adam turns around and grabs something off his desk. It’s a newspaper and what looks like a half-smushed sandwich. “You missed dinner.” Adam shoves the sandwich at Shiro, who takes it slowly. “And the feature that the Atlantic ran on Kennedy visiting the Garrison in a few weeks. There’s a bit about him meeting with you.” The newspaper is handed over shortly after.

Shiro stands there, back pressed to the door of Adam’s room, one hand holding a smuggled sandwich that Adam had made for him to make sure that he ate even though Shiro had totally _lied_ about where he was.

“I-” Shiro starts, but Adam cuts him off and barrels on.

“You don’t have to tell me where you were,” he says, and his voice is several notches lower. “I don’t know if it was an Iverson thing, or like, if you were _with_ someone, and I swear I don’t care but –”

Shiro surprises both of them by interrupting Adam before he can finish. “Iverson gave me keys to a speeder,” he blurts. He pulls the keys from his pocket and offers them to Adam. “He told me not to tell the other cadets because like, hello infractions, but uh. I took it out for the first time.”

For a moment, Adam is uncharacteristically silent. “Oh,” he says after a moment. “That’s – it?”

“Yeah?” Shiro says, shocked. Adam seems underwhelmed. “What did you think I was doing?”

Adam’s cheeks color. “Nothing,” he says quickly. He gestures to Shiro’s messy hair and oversized jacket. “I mean, like.”

“Oh my god.” Shiro’s voice spills out unwarranted for the second time in a matter of minutes. “You thought I was hooking up with someone.”

“No!” Adam shouts, then slaps his hands over his face and mumbles. “Maybe.”

Laughter bubbles up in Shiro’s chest, half at Adam’s embarrassed admission and half at the sheer idea that he’d be gone on anyone other than Adam.

“Shut up,” Adam groans, shoving at Shiro’s shoulders. “Eat your sandwich. I stole that for you.”

Shiro pretends to examine the cafeteria meat pressed between two pieces of stale white bread – a Garrison staple meal. “What a sacrifice,” he muses. “How could I ever repay you?” His voice grows serious. “Hey,” he says, reaching out to rest his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth. I just feel kind of weird about all this,” he gestures to the Atlantic article, “weird ‘golden boy’ shit.”

“I know, you humble bastard,” Adam huffs. “But I do know how you can make it up to me.”

“Yeah?” Shiro breathes, looking up to meet Adam’s eyes, which have gone from embarrassed to devious.

“Take me for a ride sometime,” he says, and Shiro’s heart skips a beat. Flying through the desert with Adam pressed against his back, arms circled around his waist, laying under the desert sky, staring at the stars with the heat of Adam’s body inches away. Will he survive that? Probably not.

But because Shiro is a masochist, and because he’s head over heels for his best friend, he tells him yes anyways.

Whatever, it’s not like Iverson can kick Shiro out now that it’s been announced to the whole globe that he’s getting interviewed by the president.

* * *

Something weird is going on with Allura. She keeps hanging out with Shiro and Adam when they’re studying and loitering around their table during lunch. Shiro thinks about her wandering around the halls the night and he and Adam snuck out to fly the simulator together – he never did have the chance to ask her what she had been doing out that night.

It isn’t that he doesn’t like her company, per se – she’s smart and witty and has slid nicely into their little group. Allura is a natural born leader and it shows in everything she does, from the way she flies to her color-coded study notes.

But since that night, she’s been acting weird around Shiro. She keeps trying to get him alone, between classes or after dinner, opening her mouth like she has something to say, and then getting interrupted by Adam, or another classmate, or Iverson, or an entire horde of 4th years stampeding down the hallway after turning in their final papers.

“Shiro,” Allura hisses after they’ve finished flight dynamics and are spilling out of Iverson’s classroom. “I need to talk to you.” Her shoulder presses against Shiro’s as they push through the doorframe and into the hallway. Shiro looks ahead, where Adam is teasing Matt Holt about his flying while Matt wails ‘I _told_ my dad I wanted to be an engineer!’

“Okay.” He turns to Allura. “What’s going on? Is this about the other night when you were-”

“Shhhh!” Allura shushes him. “Not here.” She tugs him down the hallway, holding on to the tail of his backpack as a leash. They traipse down the hallway, passing students and lockers until Allura is yanking him into a janitor’s closet when no one is looking and slamming the door behind them.

_Oh my god_ . Shiro’s mind runs a thousand miles per hour. _She’s going to kiss me. Holy shit, she’s going to kiss me. She’s going to kiss me and I’m going to have to turn her down and then the entire school is going to find out that I’m gay and Iverson is actually going to kick me out for that and I’m never going to go into space and I’ll never see Adam again, holy shit, I have to stop this._

“I have space herpes,” Shiro word vomits at the same time that Allura asks:

“Are you dating Adam?”

They both look at each other, eyes wide. “Please don’t kiss me,” Shiro rambles on. “Also, what? Me? And Adam? Why would you think that? That’s ridiculous. Absurd. No, never, I would never...” his voice trails off as Allura pulls a piece of paper out of her pocket.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” Allura says, startled. “Have you been avoiding me because you think I’ve been trying to _ask you out,_ Shiro?”

Shiro makes a super coherent noise in response.

“Look,” Allura says, pressing the piece of paper into Shiro’s hands. “We don’t have long before someone notices that we’re missing, so I’ll make this brief. I’m not going to kiss you, or ask you out, because I’m a lesbian. I’m dating Romelle. Okay?”

Shiro’s brain is going three hundred miles per hour. Romelle? Allura is _gay_?

“I might be missing the mark here, so you’re going to have to tell me if I’m wrong, but I’m usually not about this stuff, but you’re into guys, right?”

“I.” Shiro scuffs the toe of his boot against the head of a mop. He takes a deep breath. “Yeah. I am.”

She gestures to the piece of paper in Shiro’s hand. “Thought so. A couple of cadets and a few teachers have formed an underground GSA that meets at night when we can. That’s the time and the location of the next meeting. Bring Adam, if you want.” She notices the stricken look on Shiro’s face. “Or don’t, whatever. The next one is Tuesday. _Don’t_ lose that paper.”

Then Allura shoves the door open, like it’s no big deal, pushing Shiro into the hallway under the hum of the florescent lights.

Allura swings around. “Also, space herpes? Sounds serious. Might want to get that checked out. Good chat!” she says brightly, swinging her backpack a little higher on her back. At the end of the hallway, Romelle stands pressed against the lockers, watching them casually. When Shiro catches her eye, she smirks and waves before falling into step next to Allura, laughing as they disappear around the corner.

A hand claps onto Shiro’s shoulder, and he jumps and turns around. Iverson is standing behind him, signature clipboard in one hand, the other settled on the bright orange of Shiro’s garrison uniform. He winces, preparing for a lecture about coming out of the janitor’s closet with Allura. “We need to talk about the interview,” Iverson just says. “Twelve fifteen, my office, Wednesday. Sound good?”

“Yes,” Shiro stammers, feeling like he’s gotten whiplash from the two wildly shocking conversations he’s had in the last two minutes. “Sir. That works, sir.”

Iverson gives him a curt nod, lifts his hand, and continues back down the hallway. Once he’s cleared out of Shiro’s space, he takes a deep breath and turns toward the direction of his next class – only to see Adam standing at the end of the hallway, eyes wide and books clenched tight to his chest.

“Sorry for making you wait,” Shiro says as he approaches Adam. “I had-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Adam says brightly, but Shiro can hear the tremor in his voice, like he’s stuffing down how he really feels about what he’s just seen. “We’re going to be late for history.”

As if on cue, the bell signaling the end of the passing period rings overhead. Adam holds his fake a smile for a second longer, as if to reassure Shiro that he really doesn’t care, that watching him come out of a broom closet with Allura and then get pulled aside by Iverson isn’t a big deal at all.

But Shiro doesn’t know how to start.

‘Oh, hey Adam, it’s not what you think between Allura and I. Actually, she’s gay. Actually, I’m gay too. Actually, I’m super gay for you, specifically. So no worries, right?’

As if. He doesn’t want to out Allura and he doesn’t want to risk his friendship with Adam.

So he chickens out, allows that confectionary smile to stay painted on Adam’s face, and walks next to him the whole way to history, making small talk about Kennedy’s latest push for better rocket fuel efficiency.

_Later,_ Shiro tells himself. _Someday, I’ll tell him_.

* * *

The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur. Shiro goes to class, takes notes, runs laps on the track in the baking sun until he feels like he’s going to pass out, takes a cold shower, scarfs down some dinner before the cafeteria closes (it’s peas and chicken tonight), and then finds himself in the library with Ms. Carter and Adam.

Adam is scribbling in the margins of his notebook, engrossed in whatever he’s reviewing while Shiro flicks through the day’s New York Times, skimming an article about Kennedy’s last press conference.

Here, sitting in the evening glow, reading the newspaper and sitting on an overstuffed couch a few feet away from Adam, Shiro feels a pang deep in his chest. This all feels very routine, familiar, domestic in a way that he’s never experienced before. This is their ritual, and it’s easy and peaceful. Sometimes, Allura comes and joins them, but thinking about her now doesn’t send any feelings of unease through Shiro. After their talk earlier, it’s as if this great, heterosexual weight has been lifted off Shiro’s chest.

“Iverson wants to talk to me about the interview,” Shiro says, folding the newspaper up and tossing it onto the table in front of them. He leans back against the armrest of the couch, half sprawled across the furniture. Adam looks up and snorts.

“Isn’t that in like, two weeks?” Adam asks, setting his notebook on his lap in similar fashion.

“Don’t remind me,” Shiro groans. “I’m having second thoughts.”

“Please, Mr. Golden Boy. Tell us more about the burden of being the best pilot the Garrison has ever seen.”

“That’s not true!” Shiro protests.

Adam just rolls his eyes. “What are you nervous about? The interview? Here, let’s practice.” He uncaps his pens and lifts his notebook, flipping to a blank page and scribbling something on the top of the page. “Sit up, I doubt sixty minutes is going to feature you if you’re thrown over the couch like an Afghan blanket on my jadda’s couch.”

Shiro straightens, laughing as his knees knock against Adam’s in his haste to sit up. He cracks his back, left, then right, and smiles. “Okay, Mr. President. Hit me with your best shot.”

Adam’s voice has a teasing lilt when he begins. “How does it feel to be the best pilot that the Garrison has ever seen?”

“Great.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s. Uh.”

Adam flings his pen at Shiro. It hits him square in the chest and startles him. “Hey!” Shiro protests.

“No filler words,” Adams says idly. “Start over. Hi Mr. Shirogane, nice to meet you, blah blah, yadda yadda, now how does it feel to be the best pilot the Garrison has ever seen?”

So Adam’s taking this seriously. Shiro clears his throat and plays along. “Thanks for having me, Mr. President. It’s an honor to fly for the Garrison.”

“Mention America,” Adam prompts. “They’ll eat that shit up. It’s time to be Captain America, except you’re Japanese and a lot less blonde.”

Shiro barks a laugh. “Okay, okay, how’s ‘it’s an honor to fly for the Garrison and the stars and stripes?’”

Adam nods, scribbles something on his notepad, and barrels on. “Better. Tell us what an average day looks like for a Garrison cadet.”

“Well, uh,” Shiro starts, and Adam volleys another pen. It sails above his head and clatters down the library floor. Shiro soldiers on. “It’s very? Rigorous? We wake up at seven am, I usually eat breakfast and then head down to the library to read the news before class starts. Then we’re in class until three, and then I run laps or work out until dinner. Then it’s back to the library for more studying. And that’s pretty much every day, I guess.”

“Very good, very good,” Adam says. “What prompted you to join the Garrison cadet program?”

He takes a deep breath. “I always loved space. My dad used to point out constellations to me when I was really young. He worked a lot, so I only really saw him at night, and so some of my best memories are of us laying on the roof of our apartment building and competition to see who could identify more stars and constellations. And then, after he...”

Shiro swallows and drops his gaze, staring down into his lap. 

“After he died, it seemed like the only thing that _didn’t_ change were the stars. Even when I bounced from foster houses, it was the same sky above me at night. So when my case manager mentioned that my standardized test scores were high enough to qualify me for additional testing at a local Garrison facility, I jumped at the change. And piloting always just seemed natural to me. My dad was a bus driver, so. Runs in the family. I guess – I figure that if I’m able to be up there, in space, with the stars someday, I’ll be that much closer to him again.”

When he looks up, Adam isn’t writing anymore. His notebook is flat across his lap, and he’s staring at Shiro with wide eyes. Then, to Shiro’s horror, Adam’s eyes start watering.

Shiro leans forward hurriedly, and rests his palms on Adam’s thighs. “Adam. It’s okay. Really.”

Adam closes the rest of the distance between them, barreling Shiro backwards onto the couch. He’s half thrown back, half falling off the cushions, with Adam on top of him. One of his hands is laced around the back of his neck and the other circles his waist. Adam’s hot puffs of breath bounce off the exposed skin of Shiro’s neck. Unwarranted, Shiro’s hands have slid up around Adam’s back, who had a knee on the corner of the couch and is acting as the only thing that is keeping Adam from being completely sprawled on him.

“I’m so sorry,” Adam says, squeezing just a little tighter. “I didn’t know it was that bad.” And Shiro has heard those words so many times before – from the cops who told him about the accident, the foster parents who took him in, the teachers who asked why he was a midyear transfer – but it never felt like this. As if it wasn’t a formality at all.

He tugs back, letting Adam sink into him. There is a moment when the entire left side of Shiro’s is live wired, hot like a parked car, simmering where Adam’s body meets his own.

Shiro forgets how to breathe, and his cheeks turn a burning red as Adam tumbles off the left edge of the couch, knee slipping on the old fabric cushions and tossing him onto the library floor.

He can hear Adam starting to chuckle below him. For a moment, Shiro just sits there and stares at the ceiling, cheeks still feeling red, the color of city bus lines, and he can’t catch his breath. Below him, Adam shifts and out of the corner of Shiro’s eye, he can see tousled brown hair and askew glasses.

“Sorry, did I knee you on my way down?” Adam says, still between puffs of laughter. “My bad. You good?”

It’s his voice, lilting and casual as it tastes Shiro’s name. He sits up, trying to compose himself and do something that isn’t, you know, _kiss Adam_ right now. At the same time that he forces his lagging body into action, Adam moves to rise off the floor and stand.

Each of them freezes just before colliding. Shiro finds himself face to face with Adam, their noses inches apart. He notices the blushing of Adam’s cheeks, the curls that dip below the rim of his classes, the flecks of green in his warm brown eyes, even the faint speckling of freckles over the bridge of his nose.

Then Adam’s eyes blink down, flicking from Shiro’s lips and then back up. There is a moment, when Adam licks his lips and breathes out, “Listen, Takashi,” that Shiro thinks –

“Boys, I’m heading home in five,” Ms. Carter calls from across the library, faint enough that Shiro knows that she wasn’t in eyesight.

Adam jerks away, eyes wide. Shiro feels himself pushing backwards, breath coming fast, worried, _oh fucking shit_ , and hopping to his feet.

“I better go,” Shiro stammers out, grabbing his notebook off the table and the handle of his beaten black backpack. He trips over himself trying to climb past the couch. He doesn’t even want to look at Adam’s face. God, how stupid could he have been? Thinking that he was going to kiss Adam? Thinking Adam was going to kiss _him_? “I’ll see you tomorrow, bye Adam, goodnight Ms. Carter!” He throws over his shoulder as he charges through the empty library, head still low and backpack banging against his legs as he hurries out the door and into the dark corridor.

Shiro takes a moment, after exiting the room, to lean against the cool concrete of the air-conditioned Garrison walls and bang the back of his skull onto the surface.

“ _Stupid_ ,” Shiro whispers to himself, then shoves himself away from the painted sign reading “LIB 02” and into the silence of the night.

* * *

Shiro is successfully able to avoid Adam for the next few hours, but his luck runs out as soon as Iverson gets involved. They’re in flight class, of course, when Iverson rattles off the new pairs for the next duo simulation he has planned. When he skims past ‘Altea’ and ‘Holt,’ a faintly ill feeling rises in Shiro’s gut. Sure enough, Iverson barks out “Shirogane, Waseb,” at the end of the lineup, and the rest of the class starts separating into groups.

Shiro takes a deep breath, trying to channel the confidence he’d found when he had flown the simulator with Adam the first time. His palms hurt where his nails dig into the soft flesh.

Adam is the one to close the gap. His face is closed off and oddly blank, as if Shiro is a stranger that he’s meeting for the first time mid-May. He looks even more unfamiliar than he did the first time that he talked to Shiro, that fateful time he slid into Shiro’s life and lunch table.

“Hey,” Shiro greets him when he grows close. Shiro tucks his hands into his pockets and refuses to meet Adam’s eyes. Beside him, Adam lets out a soft sigh, his shoulders slumping, as if downcast by Shiro’s greeting.

Iverson starts speaking, heeling off anything that Shiro could have thought to say to smooth the situation over. “Today, you’ll be flying with the duo partners that you’ll likely be tested with for your final exam in a real jet. How you fly today is going to be a big factor in your final grade, even if this isn’t the final.” He surveys the room, meeting Shiro’s eyes. “You’ll need to fly in conjunction with your partner to get out of a sticky situation. This isn’t a test about how well you can fly solo, it’s about how well you can work with a crew.”

Shiro swallows.

“We’ll be starting off with the lowest composite score in the rankings. Shirogane, Waseb, you’re first.” Iverson rattles off. Of course, they’re first. SHIRO was first last week in the rankings (as usual), with ALTEA coming in second and WASEB narrowly in third. Allura’s been partnered off with Matt Holt, who is nervously shaking her hand overenthusiastically across the room.

Iverson opens the door to the simulator room and gestures toward the empty space. Almost of his own accord, Shiro feels his boots moving and entering the room. His head is still low, exposed neck cool in the brush of the overhead fans. Adam is a step behind him, falling in behind him as they cross the threshold and the door closes behind them. Everyone else must be heading to the observation room.

“Okay,” Shiro says, glancing behind him, risking a quick glance backwards “Before everyone tunes into the simulator, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about last night. For,” he waves his hands, “you know.”

Adam opens his mouth, as if to say something, but Iverson’s voice comes over the PA, cutting them off.

“Whenever you’re ready, cadets.”

Shiro gives him a grim smile, and heads to the simulator, pushing through the ancient doors and taking a seat in the left pilot seat. Adam follows behind him, trailing his fingers on the cracked vinyl before sitting in the right pilot seat and fastening his seatbelt. He gives Shiro a tentative smile across the dashboard, as if to reassure him. Shiro finds himself smiling back shyly, if only for a moment.

He pulls the communicator over his head and taps the mic once. “Comm check.”

Adam, pulling on the headset beside him, switches on the device and echoes back. “Check. Clear.”

“Clear.” Shiro echoes back. He reaches forward and jiggles the yoke of the sim. It feels so different from the last time he’d flown the simulator with Adam, exhausted from lack of sleep and high on the feeling of having something to prove. Now, with this tense energy crackling between the two of them, he wonders if they’re going to even be able to make it through the mission. And if Iverson is planning on using these pairings for their final exams, Shiro _really_ doesn’t want to fuck up and jeopardize Adam’s grade.

The lights on the simulator grow dark, and the screen in front of them begins pixelating slowly as the dashboard lights come to life.

In front of them, the moon looms, her craters and peaks illuminated in the electronic screen. Iverson’s voice streams through the cockpit.

“You’ll be doing a flyby mission today. Around the moon and back onto the trajectory for an eventual Earth re-entry. You only have fuel for one lap. Try not to die, okay?”

Shiro squeezes the controls once, feeling the ship jolt under him at the slight change in pressure. Adam, beside him, is already all business, checking gauges and twisting dials.

“Cut power wherever possible,” Adam commands, “we’re going to need a pretty big boost to escape the moon’s gravity if the readings I’m getting are at all accurate.”

Shiro nods drying, checking the power gauge at seventeen-hundred and dialing down the cabin lights and reducing oxygen. His throat is dry with the tension between Adam and himself, but the adrenaline of the mission is starting to kick in, making his fingers more dexterous and his brain work faster.

“Time to gravitational exit?”

“Two minutes, thirty-eight, no, forty, seconds.” Adam relays, drumming his nails on the dashboard. “Hold steady with current orbit.”

“Should we speed up?” Shiro presses. “Give us a little more speed to escape orbit.”

Adam shoots him a glance out of the side of his eye. “No. Too much speed is going to make the craft too unwieldy. We aren’t going to be able to retain control of the exit angle.”

Shiro nods and settles back for the ride.

A minute passes of them checking gauges and relaying metrics to each other. With a minute left until exit, a pixelated Earth enters their line of sight. Shiro checks speed. “Adam, we’re slow,” he says, watching the velocity meter wobble, then slowly drop. “We’re going to need more power than this.”

“Fucking shit, we’re losing pressure in the left booster,” Adam hisses, slamming a few buttons on the dash that expose another panel Shiro didn’t even know existed. He types something into it, and then a model of their left booster is mapped onto the console. True to Adam’s predictions, their left booster has obtained a slight leak in one of the panels, causing an uneven thrust and a tilting pod – slowing the craft – not to mention the change in angle.

Shiro looks down the digital screen. He thinks of the first duo simulation, flying next to Allura, following all the rules and guiding their craft by the book, and somehow still not being good enough.

He thinks of Iverson, pulling him out of class to tell him that he’s the best pilot that the Garrison had ever seen.

He thinks of Adam, bending over in the hallways to laugh at one of Shiro’s jokes, squinting in the dim light of the library to explain a difficult concept, breathing hot on the back of Shiro’s neck while engulfing him in a hug.

It’s almost without thinking that Shiro punches the switches to cut power in the right booster to 75% and increase the fuel line propulsion. “We’re going to have to try our hand with a little more speed,” Adam says, watching Shiro work. “I don’t know if we can hold it.”

The ship blares an alarm, crying ‘low oxygen’ in large red letters on the screen. “We’re either going to run out of oxygen or miss our pass and run out of fuel,” Shiro says with a shrug. “We’re going to have to hold it.”

Beside him Adam takes a deep breath, and then he hears his hands regrasp the yoke. “Okay. Taking her off manual now.”

“Let’s finish this,” Shiro agrees beside him. The glare of the LCD is burning his eyes as he squints, pulling the yoke slightly up and to the left to counterbalance their failing booster. The countdown on their lower left screen runs lower and lower.

It feels as if they’re alone. Iverson and the other cadets aren’t watching anymore – it’s just two boys, flying a ship because it’s something that makes them feel alive. Blitzing through space with American flags sewn onto their left sleeves and intrinsic vulnerability sewn into their hearts.

The countdown runs lower. A beat of sweat runs off the side of Shiro’s forehead and drops – ‘plop’ – onto his shoulder.

The whole ship rattles as just in the last few seconds, Shiro slams the accelerator, burning up whatever power they had left in their functioning booster and tearing the malfunctioning one to shreds. For a moment of horror, Shiro thinks that he’s killed them again, that their lost booster is going to send them spinning to _Mars_ , except then Adam is shouting “Takashi, LEFT! And STEP ON IT!” And Shiro’s hands are moving of their own accord, pressing the rest of the way down on the throttle with one hand and yanking the yoke left with the other, pulling the craft out of orbit. It quakes in open space for a terrifying second, and then seems to be pleased with the given trajectory, and the rattling evens out.

Shiro takes a deep breath, leaning back against the seat and settling his head against the headrest. He only opens his eyes when Adam kicks him in the calf and points to the screen.

There, in big green letters, are the words “SIMULATION COMPLETE.”

Shiro allows a smile to grow on his face. He unbuckles his seatbelt and turns to Adam, who is grinning from ear to ear, sweat dripping down the sides of his own face as well.

“Hell yeah,” is all Adam says, reaching forward to clap Shiro’s hand in a half high-five, half-handshake. Shiro smiles back, all the way.

“Hell yeah,” he echoes back. “You saved my ass.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Please. It was your flying that got us out of there. I’m just the physics nerd that gets you to do stuff that makes sense when you want to go off the rails and fly everything off feel.”

The awkwardness doesn’t resettle like Shiro thought it would. It feels akin to the night they flew the simulator the first time, pressed close together in a dark hallway, vying for a chance.

This was their chance. And their success blinks green on the screen in front of them, assuring the of a job well-done.

When they enter the observation room the whole cadet class is staring at them. Iverson is standing in the center of the room, tapping that damn clipboard against a table.

He makes eye contact with Shiro, nodding once, a show of almost grotesque endorsement for their flight. “Next,” Iverson says to the room, holding Shiro’s eye contact. “Altea, Holt.” Behind him, Allura and Matt rise to their feet. Iverson breaks eye contact and leads the next pair out the door and into the simulator. Beside him, Adam exhales.

“No news is good news, I guess,” he says from beside Shiro.

Shiro watches Iverson’s back disappear out of his line of sight, winding away down the corridor. Turning back to Adam, a shiver of _something_ courses through his veins. Adam’s sideways smile, his eager appreciation of their flight, makes something churn in Shiro’s stomach. Fear, knowing what Adam’s smile looks like from inches away. What it feels like to grasp their gloved hands together in victory. The subtle intimacy that’s woven itself into all of their interactions.

Shiro forces himself to smile back. “Good news,” he echoes, taking a seat on one of the empty couches. He reaches for his backpack. “Quiz me on the presidents?” he asks, pulling a crumpled sheet from his backpack and offering it to Adam. Anything to divert attention from the queasy feeling in his stomach, the awkwardness that tinges every glance Shiro sneaks to his right.

“Sure,” Adam responds. “Uh, William Taft?”

“1909 to 1913,” Shiro rattles off, redirecting his attention from his looming boy problem and back to trying to pass first year. They continue on like this until Allura and Matt start their flight, and even then, as Shiro watches Allura take swift command of the craft and steer Matt out of the path of a rogue asteroid, he can’t stop the tumbling in his stomach.

* * *

Shiro stares at the door of room B207. He stares down at the slip of crumpled paper clutched in his shaking fist.

_5/13. B207._

And then a crudely drawn rainbow.

He takes a deep breath and knocks three times. There’s scuffling from behind the door, and then it cracks open to reveal a grinning Allura.

“I hoped you’d come!” She greets him, grabbing Shiro’s arm and yanking him from the dark of the corridor into a classroom, lights turned on while a collection of students and professors are scattered around the room, perched on desks and leaning against the walls.

Shiro stumbles into the room, taking in the patchwork rainbow flag that’s clipped to the chalkboard, the words “GARRISON GSA” scrawled in cursive white chalk beside it, the third year history teacher leaning against the desk at the front of the class, nodding as he talks to a student.

Everyone turns to look at him as soon as Allura closes the door. Shiro feels suddenly shy, exposed, standing in a classroom in the middle of the night for a covert club meeting. For a moment, Shiro considers running. What would happen if he were to be found here? His scholarship yanked; title revoked. Shiro would go back to be the no-name somebody bouncing from one foster family to another.

And then Ms. Carter stands, the librarian who always saves Shiro interesting articles about art and music because she knows that he jammed the tuner on the radio in his room to get signals other than the programmed military AM channels. The librarian who opens early for Adam and closes late for Shiro. Her kind eyes and easy laughter. How she chats about the latest civil rights movements and rallies like they aren’t inconveniences to traffic.

She waves to him. “Shiro!” Ms. Carter calls from across the room. On the fourth finger of her left hand, a wedding band glistens. Shiro stares. “Welcome!”

There are other people that Shiro recognizes too. Allura and Romelle, of course, then there’s Ms. Carter and the woman sitting close to her and wearing a matching band, that third year history teacher, a commander Shiro remembers seeing speak in an assembly, and a smattering of cadets he recognizes from the hallways.

“Hi,” Shiro says, peeling one hand out of his armpit to give a little wave. “I’m Shiro.”

Allura, the godsend that she is, saves him from further embarrassment. “I promise we _all_ know who you are,” she says with a laugh. “Tell us your pronouns and a fun story we don’t know about you.”

“He/him, and a fun fact about me is. Uh,” Shiro stammers, and Adam’s face flickers into his mind, tossing an uncapped pen at his shoulder for stuttering. “Uh.” He fumbles for something even vaguely interesting about himself other than being a good pilot. “My first kiss was with my foster sister’s ex-boyfriend right after he broke up with her. It was.” Shiro’s cheeks flush at the memory of being pressed against the wooden picket fence in the warmth of a Seattle summer. A warm hand cupping Shiro’s jaw, a pair of cherry-red lips biting against Shiro’s, teeth clacking in a messy construction of what two boys wanted but knew they couldn’t have. Then he’d nodded, took a drag from the cigarette behind his ear, gotten in his car, and driven away. Shiro had never seen him again, never asked his foster sister where he was or why they’d broken up. He’d been moved to a new house a few weeks after. Cherry red. Teeth. A trail of smoke curling like a lazy smile. “Intense.”

Someone from across the room whoops, bends down, and presses a kiss to the side of another boy’s mouth. “Intense,” he says, tossing the word around like a marble in his mouth. “That’s one way to fucking put it, golden boy.”

The rest of the room is smattered with laughter, and everyone’s eyes drift away from Shiro and back to their respective conversations. Allura is whispering something to Romelle while glancing at Shiro out of the corner of her eyes. Romelle is giggling at whatever she’s saying.

Pressure off, Shiro uncrosses his arms and takes a seat on top of a desk across from Allura and Romelle. He swings a dusty boot onto the table across from them. “How did you find out about this?” he asks, and it’s Ms. Carter who answers.

“I invited them after I found them macking behind the return cart.” she says, coming up behind Shiro with her wife trailing just behind her. “Have you met my wife yet? This is Commander Okybe.” The woman behind Ms. Carter smiles and swings an arm around her wife. Shiro faintly recognizes her as one of the high-ranking flight officials.

“Pleasure,” Shiro forces out, mouth still feeling cottony and dry. “I didn’t.” His voice fades out.

“Know about all us queers? You’re not as alone as you think, Shiro, no matter what the narrative wants you to think,” Ms. Carter says with a laugh. She turns to Allura. “Should we call the meeting to order?”

Allura checks her watch and shrugs. “I guess. I think that’s everyone who managed to sneak out.” She peeks up at Shiro out from under her lashes. “Did Adam get lost, or was he not invited?”

Shiro flounders. He’s really acing all social interactions today. “We’re not - I don’t know if he’s - You know?” Allura waves her hand to save him from the misery of perpetual word vomit.

“You should invite him,” Allura says. “It’s a GSA, Shiro. Gay-Straight Alliance. Even if he’s not gay, which, just for the record, given the way he looks at you - I’d bet the whole Soviet arsenal on - he’s fun. And also, not a massive homophobe. We can use as many allies as we can get.”

Before Shiro can press the whole ‘Adam looks at you in a gay way’ comment, Allura has already moved on to the next order of business.

She turns to the class, stands on top of one of the desks, and starts shouting something to get everyone’s attention. The words ‘the way he looks at you’ are running rampant in Shiro’s head. He thinks of leaning over the cushions, Adam’s breath on his neck, on his lips, the moment where he’d thought they were going to _kiss._ Shiro allows a flicker of hope to bloom in his belly. That maybe, just maybe, Adam feels the same way about him.

* * *

_~~Dear Greetings~~ Hi Nina. _

Shiro starts the letter, scrawled onto college-lined paper he’d ripped out of his composition book.

_I know it’s been a while. I’m sorry for not writing sooner like I promised I would. I figured that you knew I’m doing okay since I haven’t been expelled or flunked out yet._

_We’re coming to the end of first year, and one of the teachers asked what I was doing for the summer. I figured that I was going back with the Bells, but I don’t actually know what the policy is for taking on kids for three months when they’re back from boarding school. They said that I could stay here too, if I wanted. I think I’d rather stay then go back to Washington. If you could arrange that? I don’t know. I really like the people and everything here. I’ve been sitting in the top three positions for class rankings all year and have been consistently first for technical flight scores. Looks like we ~~finally~~ found something I’m good at that isn’t packing boxes and moving. _

He sighs, rubbing his eyes after a long day. It’s nearing midnight, but the deadline for summer session is drawing near, and as much as Shiro would love to spend his days feeling like a burden and bouncing from house to house, he would, you know, also love to not have to do that.

_I never really thanked you for everything you’ve done for me. So. Thank you. For believing in me and in this opportunity when I really didn’t even believe in myself. I don’t know how much you’ve been keeping up with President Kennedy’s press tour, but he’s stopping by the Garrison next week. There’s going to be flight demos and interviews and meetings. They’re going to feature me in an interview with Kennedy talking about the future of space exploration and the cadet program. So, haha, if you want to see your ward on TV, tune in next week._

_I’ve been trying to practice for the interview with one of my friends. His name is Adam, and I met him the first week that we were here. He’s the only person here who still calls me ‘Takashi,’ actually. The simulator rankings take the first five letters of our last name and mine stuck as a nickname. So I’m Shiro to basically everyone but Adam, which is actually really nice. He’s my best friend, and it’s kind of more ~~intimate~~ personal. _

_Anyways, the interview. I’ve been practicing with Adam answering everything from Iranian foreign policy to what my favorite kind of sandwich is (ham and cheese). Hopefully I don’t make a fool of myself in front of the President and the whole world. Keep your fingers crossed for me._

_~~Love~~ ~~Talk to you soon~~ Thanks, _

_Shiro_

* * *

The looming door of Iverson’s office stands before Shiro, beckoning. He checks his watch. 12:14. One minute until he’s scheduled to meet with Iverson. Shiro lets out a nervous exhale and smooths the creases on his uniform slacks he’d attempted to iron this morning. Spoiler alert: he did a shit job of it. 

“Shiro?” A voice echoes from behind Shiro. He spins around, blinking at Commander Okybe as she approaches down the office corridor, clutching a stack of papers under her left arm.

“Oh, hi Commander, what are you doing here?” Shiro tries for casual and fails. In the back of his mind, he sees Ms. Carter’s arm winding around Okybe’s waist, and the soft smile that she’d given her back.

There’s no wedding ring on her finger now.

Commander Okybe points to the stack of papers. “I work here.” She stops at an office two doors down from Iverson’s.

“Oh,” Shiro says. “Obviously.” He’s still stuck staring at her left hand, and the slight difference in tan where her ring finger meets her knuckle.

Okybe catches him staring and smiles. She reaches inside the collar of her buttoned uniform and pulls out a necklace. On the end dangles a simple silver ring. She winks, once, and tucks it back inside her shirt. “Don’t you have a meeting to get to, Cadet?”

Shiro checks his watch. 12:15. When he looks up to bid Commander Okybe goodbye, she’s already gone.

He sighs, trying to shake the flutter of nerves in his stomach, and knocks twice. From the inside, a muffled voice calls out; “come in.”

Shiro pushes the heavy wooden door open, entering the stifling confines of Iverson’s office. The air is heavy laden with cigarette smoke, the one tiny window in the corner half cracked but doing a poor job of generating any kind of circulation. Iverson is reclining before his empty desk, taking a slow drag of another cigarette in the lazy heat of the almost-summer air. While Iverson seems like he’s thriving in the sweltering, smoky air, Shiro instantly starts sweating. Nerves? Heat? Probably both.

“Take a seat, Cadet Shirogane.” Iverson gestures to the rickety chair in front of him, smoke pooling out of his mouth as he speaks. Shiro stifles a cough as he lowers himself into the chair and settles his backpack on the floor beside him.

Iverson gets straight to the point. “You’ll be meeting with President Kennedy next week. I want to brief you on a few of the topics that you’ll be discussing with him. The interview is going to be informal; it’ll be him interviewing you about your experiences at the Garrison. The goal here is to recruit more cadets to the program from around the states, and to showcase the growing power of the United States Space Exploration Program. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Shiro chokes out, still trying not to cough on the smoke-laden air.

“Great. How familiar are you with recent missions?”

“Last month, Ranger 4 was the first craft to impact the far side of the moon,” Shiro says, thinking back to the sprawling headline in the evening news, and the whispers in the hallways that followed the next day. “We have missions on deck for planetary flybys, dual-person missions, and reusable spacecrafts. I’m not sure of the timeline.”

Iverson nods. “Impressive. You’re no stranger to the race to beat back the Iron Curtain. Specifics of missions will be covered by specialists, so just be aware of upcoming missions. I expect you’ll represent the Garrison well talking about the experiences and opportunities that the Pilot Cadet Program has offered you?” He raises an eyebrow.

“Yes, sir,” Shiro says dutifully.

“If the president asks if you have any questions, craft something broad, maybe funny. No policy but have a question on deck just in case. Play the ‘proud to be an American’ card. Show the commies how good we’re going to be. Oh, and the central office has arranged a suit for you. Commander Okybe, who you haven’t met yet, is heading up that initiative. Stop by her office down the hall some time before next week and she’ll have that arranged for you.” Laughter rumbles in Shiro’s chest at Iverson’s assumption that he hasn’t met Okybe yet. Their secret safeguarded by those who hold it. Iverson folds his hands across the desk. “Any other questions, Cadet?”

Shiro open his mouth to say no, to rise to his feet and scamper to the cafeteria in hopes that he can grab an apple before his afternoon classes begin, but then he thinks of the feeling of air against his skin, of skimming through the desert, of the rumble of an engine beneath his seat. Shiro can’t stop himself from asking.

“When are we going to fly, Lieutenant Commander?” Iverson cocks his head. “Real jets, I mean,” Shiro hastily coughs out.

“How is the speeder going?” Iverson asks.

Shiro, unseated by Iverson’s question, stumbles. “Great, sir. But-”

“Good.” Iverson rises. “I knew you’d take a liking to it. Stick to flying, Shirogane, and you’ll be heading a mission of your own before you know it. As for ‘real flying,’ well.” Iverson takes another drag of his cigarette and speaks through the exhalation of smoke. “Sooner than you know.”

Shiro hardly dares breathe as he rises and picks his backpack off the floor. “You think so, sir?” he asks, voice drawn tight with hope.

Iverson pauses at this and takes a moment to study Shiro’s face. “You didn’t hear this from me, but there’s interest in a crew for a moon landing mission in the coming years. It would be incredibly dangerous, and very difficult. They’ll need an experienced, adaptable pilot.” He raises an eyebrow at Shiro. “Five years out, maybe? You should have graduated by then.” The brow lowers, and Iverson heads to the door and opens it for Shiro, effectively seeing him out.

As Shiro steps into the hallway, Iverson has just one more thing to say. “I know you’re rather close with Cadet Waseb.”

Shiro’s blood runs cold.

“If I were you, I’d keep your values in line. It would be a… shame if your career as a star pilot was to be derailed by something so frivolous as a personal relationship.” The door begins to swing closed behind Shiro’s rigid back. “But I know dedication to your country and your mission will keep you in line. Goodbye, Cadet.” The door closes with a resounding slam.

The reverberation echoes down the entire hallway. Shiro is ice cold and frozen in place.

_a shame if your career_

Allura, pulling him aside in the hallway to tell him about the GSA.

_star pilot_

Flying next to Adam, in sync in a way that Shiro had never been before.

_were to be derailed_

Studying late in the library, Ms. Carter’s knowing smile peering around shelves of books.

_by something so frivolous_

Commander Okybe, the ring on a chain around her neck.

_as a personal relationship_

Adam’s smile, reaching across an ocean of loneliness that had stretched Shiro’s entire life. Beckoning, calling him to shore.

Fuck.

* * *

The rest of the week passes with a blur. The weekend comes and goes, and Shiro spends most of his time frantically borrowing tapes from the library of old interviews with Kennedy, getting his suit fitted, and working his ass off to get the Garrison up to Iverson and the rest of the commanders’ standards. Which means repainting, polishing hallways (Kennedy isn’t even going to _go_ into the lower lockdown rooms, so why the hell did Shiro just spend three hours cleaning them) and trying to cram in studying where he can. Allura and Adam are a constant presence, and Shiro is doing everything he can to keep Adam at a healthy distance, who clearly notices and keeps trying to catch Shiro alone to presumably talk to him.

He hasn’t told anyone what Iverson said to him when he was leaving his office last week. About Iverson’s warning tone, how he knew just enough to be dangerous and not enough to report them. Shiro has just been trying to keep Adam at an arm’s length, always darting off when they’re finally alone together to ‘get his laundry that he forgot haha whoops’ or ‘do you hear someone calling my name? Sounds like Iverson!’ Even Allura has started giving him funny looks. Shiro knows the gig is up, but he keeps telling himself that if he can just make it through this interview, then finals, summer will come and Adam will go home to California and Shiro will stay at the Garrison and train and when they reconvene for sophomore year, full of seventeen year old glory, the butterflies in Shiro’s stomach will have withered away.

He knows, deep down, that it isn’t the truth, but a beautiful lie is so much easier to swallow than the knife edge of verity.

Sunday night comes around after a weekend of cleaning the Garrison in anticipation for Kennedy’s visit on Wednesday. Shiro is sitting on his dorm bed, thumbing through a book that just came into the library on the making of Kennedy’s presidency, when a faint knock comes through the door.

Shiro’s attention jolts up from his book to his door. It’s almost curfew. No one should be out and about. Unless it’s –

The knock comes again, just as faint. Shiro tucks his bookmark into his page, which is a postcard from Los Angeles that Adam had mailed him during Christmas vacation, and rises to open the door.

He’s right. It’s Adam. Adam, standing on the threshold of Shiro’s room, trembling with his uniform creased and his eyes red and puffy.

“Can I come in?” Adam whispers to the floor, and Shiro barely catches his words. This is so unlike the Adam he’s come to know, who knows exactly what he wants and exactly how he’s going to achieve it. It startles Shiro to realize that he’s never seen Adam meek before.

Shiro steps out of the doorframe, beckoning to his room, illuminated only by the flickering bedside lamp. Adam follows him in as Shiro closes the door and turns to ask him what happened.

“My grandpa died,” Adam says, his voice cracking on the last word. “Iverson found me in the library to tell me that there was a call on the line, and it was my mom.” His back is still to Shiro. “He had a bad heart. I guess. I guess it just.” Adam chokes down a sob and Shiro rushes to close the gap between them. He pauses with his hand just over Adam’s shoulder. “Gave out,” Adam finishes faintly.

_Fuck it_ , Shiro thinks, and drops his hand onto Adam’s shoulder and pulls his friend toward him. Adam collapses into Shiro’s chest, cinching Shiro’s lower back in a vice grip with his arms. Shiro pulls Adam closer, holding him as Adam lets out a choked sob into his chest. They stand like that for a few minutes, Adam crying into his shoulder while Shiro runs his hands up and down Adam’s back and hums quietly.

Grief is a beast that Shiro knows well. Grief is an old friend that comes around when you least expect it and catches you off guard every time. Grief is the person that you never want to meet but can’t help knowing anyways.

“I’m sorry,” Adam sniffs as he untangles himself from Shiro’s arms. “I totally got snot all over your shirt.” Shiro’s chest feels empty without Adam’s weight pressed against it.

“I don’t care,” Shiro tells him truthfully. “Are you okay?” He winces. “I mean, obviously you aren’t, but is there anything I can do?”

Adam shakes his head and takes off his glasses to halfheartedly clean them on the hem of his jacket. “I knew this was coming. He had a heart attack a few years ago. I just didn’t get to say goodbye, and now I can’t go to the funeral and.” Adam squeezes his eyes tight, like he’s trying to hold the tears back by sheer willpower. “And it just _sucks_.”

“’Sucks’ is the understatement of the year,” Shiro tells Adam, who chokes out a hiccup comprised of half laugh, half sob. “What do you mean, you can’t go to the funeral?”

Adam shrugs. “I guess my mom called to request that she could come and pull me out for a few days to break the news in person and let me attend the funeral. Iverson denied her request and transferred the line to me.”

Shiro thinks back to Iverson’s warning in the hallway and can’t help but feel like he’s partially to blame. That maybe if they weren’t so close, Iverson wouldn’t have a bone to pick with Adam, that he might have let him go the funeral, that Adam wouldn’t have to be here, grieving hundreds of miles away instead of with his family.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says, his chest aching. He’s seen photos of Adam’s family, watched Adam’s pointer finger trace tiny faces and point out his _jiddo_ and _teito,_ who immigrated to America as teenagers and met when they were both working at a Persian grocery store. It wasn’t exactly like home, Adam had told Shiro when he’d recounted his family’s journey from Jordan to America, but it was people who knew a little bit of their language, who ate similar foods and told stories of deserts that echoed the same. Shiro knew that Adam’s grandparents had lived with him and helped raise him and his siblings when his own parents were working. How Adam used to teach his grandpa algebra out of the back of his middle school textbooks because he had never finished school.

Shiro thinks of his own father, who is laying under six feet of Earth at a graveyard in Washington, buried in a wooden coffin because he barely had enough savings to cover the funeral rights, better off something fancy. His father’s voice, pointing to the night sky, whispering ‘star’ in Japanese because Shiro would never learn his native tongue in a classroom.

He doesn’t know what else to say, really. There hadn’t been anyone to comfort him when his father had died, just foster parents who patted his shoulder awkwardly and handed him a bar of soap and a house key. But he understands this beast.

Adam sniffs. “It’ll be okay. I’ll be home in a month anyways.”

“It doesn’t have to be okay,” Shiro presses. “Adam, look at me.” Adam raises his eyes to look at Shiro for the first time. “I know you aren’t okay, and that’s okay. I’m here for you.” His brown eyes swim with unshed tears, and Shiro doesn’t know what to do. How to get Adam out of his own head, how to soothe the bruise that can’t be seen, only felt.

But then, there’s always how Shiro does it. How he turns off the world and takes off into the night, allows the open sky to absolve his mistakes and swallow his shortcomings. “Can I show you something?” He blurts, before he loses his nerve.

Adam nods, still not daring to speak.

“Okay,” Shiro says, and lets out a rattling breath. “But first, we’re going to need to get you out of that uniform.”

Twenty minutes and the shedding of the garish orange of Adam’s uniform later, Shiro is guiding them through the hallways, using only the red of the emergency exit lights to guide them toward the ground floor.

“Where are we going?” Adam hisses under his breath as Shiro punches in the administrator code to another locked door. The Garrison is _really_ bad at security for what is supposed to be a high-tech secret military base. Shiro swiped the admin codes off a teacher’s desk the second week of class and they’ve never been changed.

Hey, he said he was a good student, not a perfect one.

“Do you remember that night I came back really late and you thought I was sneaking out to hook up with someone?” Even in the dark, Shiro can see Adam’s cheeks redden. He opens his mouth to protest, but Shiro barrels on. “And you asked me where I was, and I told you that Iverson had given me the keys to a speeder?” Adam’s mouth closes as they turn down another hallway and jog down a flight of stairs. “And you made me promise to take you out sometime?”

Adam breathes a soft “yeah.”

Shiro punches in one final code, and with a shuddering groan, the door opens to reveal the warm desert night before them.

He looks back at Adam, who looks like he’s on the verge of tears again. “I thought maybe we could take that ride now?”

Adam, wearing Shiro’s black hoodie and inconspicuous jeans, standing on the threshold of the dark, eyes still puffy and red from crying, is still the most beautiful thing that Shiro has ever seen. Adam’s mussed hair, his easy smile when he follows Shiro onto the tarmac, trusting and gentle. Shiro has to yank his eyes away from Adam’s face, from tracing the curve of his mouth and the pout of his lips. He’s going to _die_.

Together, they jog through the darkness toward the hangar where Shiro keeps the speeder stashed. “I see why you made me wear dark clothes now,” Adam huffs from behind Shiro as they sprint around a corner to avoid the weak flashlight of one of the night guards. Shiro shoots him a mischievous smile over his shoulder. They slip inside, and while Shiro heads straight for the tarp covering the craft in the far corner, Adam trails behind to look at row after row of parked and blocked aircraft.

By the time Adam has finished his self-guided tour of the hangar, Shiro has thrown off the cover from the speeder and refilled the meager gas tank. He tosses a leg over the seat and inserts the keys. The ancient vehicle rumbles to life underneath him. Adam stands just off to the side, looking shocked.

“Ready?” Shiro taunts, and Adam swallows, then swings on behind Shiro.

Shiro was prepared to take Adam out under the stars. He was prepared to fly with him. He was prepared to sneak out under the hush of the night, Iverson’s words still echoing in his years. What he was not prepared for, however, was the flush press of Adam’s chest against Shiro’s back. Of Adam’s hands circling around his waist and pulling, once, to settle snugly behind Shiro. He clears his throat, thankful that he’s facing forward so that Adam can’t see the blush on his cheeks.

They start slow – skimming along the tarmac, Shiro giving Adam time to adjust to the feeling of the hot desert air in his face and letting him savor the sight of the Garrison growing ever-smaller behind them. When he reaches the salt flats, he pins the accelerator and the speeder shoots off. Adam’s arms cinch around his waist as they surge forward, then loosen as he lets out a whoop and lifts one hand from Shiro’s waist to raise to the sky. Shiro presses faster, the speeder humming as it shifts gears and keeps accelerating.

The mountains grow larger, the stars more tangible. Distance is a destination. How far away from their problems can they fly? Adam, away from his grandfather and Iverson’s cold words. For Shiro, the looming eclipse of Kennedy’s interview and the weight of a growing legacy saddled on his shoulders.

An idea strikes Shiro halfway from the rock outcropping he’s designated as his stargazing spot. He eases the speeder up, slowing until the rush of desert air against their cheeks is no more than a gentle breeze. When they’ve slowed to a stop, he turns around to look at Adam. It’s a mistake.

Adam’s cheeks are flushed from adrenaline. He’s grinning ear to ear, eyes gleaming with excitement, wind-whipped hair going in every direction. Under the moonlight, his tan skin is illuminated, Shiro’s sweatshirt hanging off one shoulder and exposing the skin. Shiro wants to press his mouth into the junction between Adam’s neck and shoulder, jealous of the moonlight that gets to kiss what he cannot. Here, sitting in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night, sneaking out to run away from their teenage problems, Shiro feels younger than he has in a long time. Like all the weight from the past years has been left behind, just grains of sand turned up by their speeder.

“Do you want to try?” Shiro asks. Without waiting for a response, he rises off the seat, hopes onto the desert sand, and then climbs back up behind Adam.

Adam makes a garbled noise when Shiro slams against his back. “Takashi…” he says. “Are you sure?”

Shiro doesn’t bid him an answer. Adam scoots forward, and flicks the red motor engage switch.

“Okay, now you have to do the clutch,” Shiro coaxes. “Slide your left foot under the metal bar – no, the other metal bar – there. Click up to shift. Watch the RPMs, when they’re between four and five thousand you’re going to have to shift gears.” He leans forward, and tugs Adam’s hands onto the wide handles. “It’s like flying the sim.”

“Yeah, except if I crash we eat shit,” Adam mutters, but flexes the steering handles anyways and revs the engine. It echoes through the desert around them. “Whatever. You strapped in, space cadet?”

Shiro opens his mouth to respond, but the words are plucked out of his mouth and replaced with a yelp as Adam hits the accelerator, seamlessly shifting up the gears as the speeder speeds up. They’re whipping through the desert seconds later, Adam dodging yucca trees left and right. At first, his steering is jerky, but after a few near misses with particularly sharp cacti, he figures it out. But Adam never lets up on the speed. The craft just keeps racing along.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you I grew up driving my _jiddo_ ’s stick shift pickup truck?” Adam calls over his shoulder with a laugh as he swerves around an outcropping of rocks at top speed, prompting Shiro to cinch his arms around Adam’s waist as the craft tilts to the side. “This is nothing!”

They drive for a little while longer, Adam relishing the hot air flying by and Shiro enjoying being so close to a happy Adam. When they near Shiro’s favorite spot, he taps Adam on the thigh and points to the outcropping of rocks. Adam pulls up and cuts the engine.

“I didn’t know you could fly like that!” Shiro says, still half-shouting to be heard over the whine of the engine winding down.

Adam laughs and sits back, flexing his arms out in front of him. Shiro becomes all-too aware of his arms still loosely circling Adam’s waist, now almost resting in his lap. He untangles himself as slowly as he dares. “You’re not the only one with a few tricks up your sleeve. I grew up driving shitty cars through the desert. It’s part of being from Southern California.”

“I feel like that’s a lie,” Shiro shoots back, thinking of palm-tree lined boulevards and crashing waves. California seems like a long drive and impossible timeline away.

“I live there, I make the rules.” Adam declares, and hops off the speeder. Shiro follows and they start climbing the looming rocks in front of them.

“There’s a nice place to lay and look at the stars at the top that isn’t all sandy,” Shiro says as they scrabble up the sheer sandstone face.

A second later, Adam swears loudly and Shiro hears a definitive ripping sound. “I hope me tearing up your sweatshirt is worth it,” Adam calls from below him. “Because I hate to say it, but I’m totally trashing this thing right now.”

“No worries, I think I stole that from my foster brother like four years ago,” Shiro replies. “He was a total asshole.”

Adam snorts, and Shiro scrambles to the top of the rock, then turns around and grabs Adam’s hand, pulling them both onto the small plateau. Just enough room for two people to lay and gaze up at the stars. Uncomfortably hard, but tantalizingly free.

Shiro pulls Adam down next to him and gives his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness.

“Wow,” Adam murmurs from beside him as the night sky, previously speckled with a few stars, blooms into the Milky Way.

“Pretty cool, right?” Shiro whispers back. “I like to come out here when I can’t focus. It just,” he waves his hand vaguely. “Gives me patience, I guess.”

Adam doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then, when he does speak, it’s with a more somber tone. “Thanks for bringing me out here. I know how hard it is to share something so personal and special.”

It is. This is Shiro’s place, somewhere he found to hide himself away from the light of the day, from the shadow of the golden boy badge pinned to his uniform. Somewhere he can lay under the stars and pretend that he’s eight, laying on his back with his dad next to him, talking about school and his dad’s route and what it had been like for Shirogane, Senior, to spend most of his childhood in an internment camp ten miles outside of Oakland.

Shiro’s heart pings. Before he can stop himself, the words come tumbling out. “You’re special too, you know.”

It’s stupid, cheesy, juvenile. Shiro’s cheeks redden and Adam laughs beside him. It isn’t a sad laugh, or even a mocking one. It’s genuine, like he’s said something funny and insightful. Shiro feels warm on the inside, like all his guts have turned into mush whenever Adam directs his attention at him.

_I want to share everything I find special with you_ , Shiro thinks, risking a glance at Adam out of the corner of his eye. He is staring up at the stars again. _I want you to know how special you are to me. I want to show you how special you are, starting with kissing you. I –_

“Cassiopeia.” Adam interrupts Shiro’s thoughts. He raises his hand and uses his pointer finger to gesture to a cluster of stars. “The boastful.”

Shiro hums, brushing his knuckles against the back of Adam’s hand when he settles it back between them.

“I used to make up stories about all the constellations,” Adam continues softly. “My family would point them out to me, and I’d come up with some long, elaborate reason that they were up in the sky. And they never corrected me. I was just a kid, and they encouraged me to write my own stories, my own path, from the very beginning.”

He turns his head to look at Shiro, and Shiro turns so that they’re nose to nose, breaths puffing against each other.

“Hey,” Adam says carefully, and then swallows. “I’m not sure if I made you uncomfortable in the library the other day and if you’ve been avoiding me because of that, but if that’s the reason you’ve been distant the last couple of days, I just wanted to say that I was sorry.”

“I wasn’t,” Shiro blurts. Adam raises an eyebrow. “Uncomfortable.” Adam licks his lips and looks away from Shiro’s face, like he didn’t expect to come this far and is out of script to follow. Shiro takes a deep breath. “Do you think I could – could I have a do-over?”

Adam’s eyes dart right back up to Shiro’s. He hardly dares breathe, feeling hollowed at by the fact that he _just asked Adam if he wanted to try and kiss him_.

There is a moment when Shiro thinks Adam is going to scoot away and get up, he looks so nervous. Then he steels himself, glimpses down at Shiro’s lips, and then his eyes are feathering shut, and Shiro’s heard enough lunchtime rumors to know what’s coming next. He closes his eyes too, exhales, nudges their foreheads together and then –

In the distance, a siren sounds. The boys shoot apart, Shiro’s eyes springing open to the see the source of the noise – the Garrison, hulking in the distance, all lit up with Soviet-red emergency lights and blasting their nuclear sirens like all hell is about to break loose.

Adam summarizes the entire situation pretty damn well when he comments, in a completely deadpan voice: “Well fuck.”

They book it back to the Garrison. Shiro spends half of the drive swerving to avoid cacti at top speed and the other half risking glances up at the sky, as if an impending missile will sail over their heads and he’ll catch a glimpse of the end of the world.

Behind him, Adam is swearing up a storm. By the time they’re back at the hangar and running across the tarmac, emergency lights still flashing and sirens blaring, he catches Shiro’s sleeve and yanks him to a halt.

“Takashi, we can’t just barge in there,” he pants. “If the officers find us out of our quarters we’ll get in huge trouble.”

Shiro has his hand pressed against the switch to the door to the Garrison. He’s a half second away from pushing it when he looks back at Adam, whose eyes are blown wide with fear.

“Adam, priorities. We might be about to get nuked into the next dimension,” Shiro protests. “Let’s go.” He turns back to the door, ready to open it and lead them into the service corridor, no doubt swarming with personnel.

“I won’t go,” Adam says, resolute despite the tremor underlining his voice. He says something else, unintelligible over the wail of the sirens.

“What?” Shiro replies, punching in the entry code.

Adam lurches forward and grabs Shiro’s wrist, spinning him about face. “I _said_ , I can’t lose my scholarship.” He sounds frustrated. “If we get caught, that’s a major infraction, which is grounds for them to pull my scholarship. They won’t dare do anything to you, you’re the pet project of the entire fucking United States military. But me? I’m just a brown kid from a rundown California town that’s only ranked well because I work my ass off. For every cadet in this program, there were a thousand other applicants they could have picked from. Replacing me is as easy as giving one of them a call.”

Adam’s mouth is pressed into a hard line. Shiro feels a sharp pang of humiliation, then embarrassment, then a renewed determination. Adam is right – not about the being replaceable part, because there is no other like him in the entire world – but right about how Shiro has let his immortality cloud his judgement. If he ever wants to be a leader he must think with others in mind. If he even wants to be a good friend, he mustn’t forget how others feel.

Shiro looks up, scanning for the missile that doesn’t come. He looks back at Adam’s pinched lips, the worried furrow in his brow.

“Okay,” Shiro says, yanking his hand off the panel and pulling Adam along the side of the building. “How do you feel about property damage?”

He scans the ground, picking up rocks and sticks before tossing them away.

“Huh?” Adam asks, stumbling along behind him.

Shiro finds a rock twice the size of his fist underneath a scruffy hedge. He scans the rows of windows a few feet above their heads. It’s hard to see anything, the incessant flashing from the red nuclear lights casting everything in a sickening glow before returning back to total darkness. “Can you boost me up to that window?” Shiro asks. Adam clues into the plan and nods. “I think this is the second-floor South corridor girls’ bathroom.” Shiro tells him as he presses his shoe into Adam’s linked hands and is boosted high enough to grab onto the window ledge. When he’s precariously teetering on the edge, Shiro grabs the rock and hammers the window once, twice, _CRACK_. The window gives and shatters.

Shiro smashes the rest of the glass in with his fist before he hops in the window, glass crunching under his boots as he lands in the dark of the empty bathroom.

“Okay,” he calls down, dangling out the window and reaching for Adam. “Grab my hand, I’ll pull you up.”

Adam looks hesitant, looking side to side as if a magic ladder is about to appear and help him. Shiro leans a little further out, wincing as shards of glass prick him through his thin jacket. The sirens keep wailing, and a bead of sweat runs down Shiro face. Or maybe it’s blood. It’s too dark and chaotic to tell. They need to get down to the concrete bunker, where in the case of a nuclear attack, they’ll be safe.

Or at least, that’s what the staff says. Shiro’s read enough about atomic bombs to know that if one lands even relatively close to the Garrison, no amount of concrete and steel reinforcement will keep them from either being crushed alive by the impact or neutralized by radiation poisoning.

Adam jumps and grabs his hand, kicking his legs along the wall to propel himself inside the building. They tumble onto the floor together, broken glass, checkered linoleum, and two teenage boys splayed out.

“Are you okay?” Shiro asks, climbing to his feel and rubbing his hands together to dislodge most of the glass.

Adam nods and rises, pushing his glasses further up on his nose. “Thanks,” he says quietly.

Shiro finds time to bump against his shoulder. “Of course.” He opens the bathroom door, surveying the hallway, which is empty. He grabs Adam’s hand. “Let’s go.”

The fallout shelter is in the basement of the building, meaning that they only need to descend two floors and come up with a decent excuse for being a half hour late. He could tell the truth, but then Adam would get in trouble for sneaking out with him. He could say that he was in the library studying and that he’d tried to find Adam and it had taken a long time. Fuck, he hopes that Iverson is too lazy to take roll and notice them missing.

They’re charging down the last set of stairs, Shiro’s mind still racing to find an excuse, when the alarms fall silent. The red flashing emergency lights turn off, only to be replaced by the overhead lights slowly turning on, bathing the two boys in a solid yellow glow. They stand stuck in the stairwell, frozen as the emergency wails fall silent and the Garrison seems to come alive again. Below them, they can hear boots hitting stairwells as cadets and staff begin climbing out of the shelter.

Shiro freezes, looking at Adam like a deer in the headlights. It’s Adam who saves their ass, this time. He yanks their still-joined hands and pulls Shiro into a dark alcove next to a fire hydrant. Not thirty seconds later, and a troupe of senior officers jog past the landing where they had been standing. Shiro catches a snippet of their conversation.

“All present and accounted for?” A deep voice asks. Shiro doesn’t recognize it.

But he does recognize the next. “All cadets reported.” Iverson.

Shiro grits his teeth and waits for the inevitable. But Iverson doesn’t say anything else. The commander and the rest of the staff continue climbing upwards, going through different ranks. Nothing is said about the two awry cadets.

When the rest of the cadets and Garrison personnel reach the stairs, Shiro and Adam slip out of the alcove and fall in with the sweaty masses. They climb the stairs in wide-eyed silence. How the hell did Iverson not notice their absence? Especially if he took roll. Shiro swallows. His chest feels tight, like a boa constrictor his settled in his trachea and is slowly, slowly squeezing.

But then, a hand grabs his shoulder and shoves him to the side, bouncing him off a third-year ginger engineer who shoots him a dirty look. Allura pushes herself between Shiro and Adam, her white hair going in every direction, clothes rumpled from clearly having been pulled from bed.

“Where the fuck were you two?” she hisses. “I saved your asses and told Iverson you were with Okybe helping bring down rations when he took roll, and you’re lucky he didn’t fact-check me.”

So that’s why Iverson didn’t know they were missing. Shiro makes a mental note to mail Allura a fruit basket. Or let her cheat off him on every test for the rest of the year. Something monumentally gratuitous.

With the night he’s having, Shiro figures that he might as well come clean to Allura. “We snuck out,” he whispers back. “Iverson gave me keys to a speeder and we took it out.”

“Well you picked an awful night for a midnight rendezvous. They decided to do a nuclear lockdown drill.”

“Yeah,” Adam puffs out from the other side of Allura. “We noticed.”

They climb in silence for a few steps, jostled by the mass of people jockeying to get off on their respective floors and return to bed.

“How did you even get in without getting caught?” Allura asks. “There were patrols to round up all the stragglers.”

Shiro blushes. “You know the girls bathroom on the second floor South Corridor?”

Allura raises an eyebrow.

“I’d maybe. Avoid that one for a little while.”

“Hm,” Allura hums, then reaches up to thumb Shiro’s forehead. “Explains the blood.” She wipes her finger on Shiro’s sleeve, letting her hand linger for a moment. “Romelle is pissed at you too, you know.”

“Sorry,” Shiro shoots back, “I kind of didn’t plan for there to be nuclear drill in the middle of my adventure.” He turns to look at Adam, expecting him to come up with some snappy remark. But Adam’s eyes are trained on Allura’s thumb, which is still pressed firmly against Shiro’s chest.

_Interesting_ , Shiro thinks and catalogues the thought to ruminate about the next time he’s having a gay crisis at two in the morning.

The three of them exit the stairwell, marching down the hallway that leads to the first-year dorms.

“Whatever,” Allura says, stopping at her door. “You’re welcome.” She manages a half smile. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Shiro barks out a tiny laugh. “Okay, Allura. I know you love me.”

She rolls her eyes, flips him off, and slams the door closed. Shiro turns to Adam, who has a funny look on his face. He clears his throat and shakes his head just slightly. The look vanishes. The boys continue down the hallway, toward their respective rooms.

“Thank you for tonight,” Adam breaks the silence, which has fallen almost uncomfortable in Allura’s absence. “I mean, the whole nuclear drill thing was kind of a bummer, but it was really nice before that. Made me feel a lot better.”

Shiro swallows down a lump in his throat. “Yeah, anytime,” he says, trying to play it cool and not like he’s totally absolutely one hundred percent gutted that he was an inch and a half away from kissing Adam until the _fucking_ alarms had to go off.

His nonchalant answer just causes Adam’s face to tighten again. Shiro opens his mouth to say something – maybe invite Adam into his room, ask if they can talk, _anything_ , but Adam just claps his hand on the back of Shiro’s neck, smiles once (that tight, close-lipped smile that Shiro loves because he loves everything about Adam but also hates because it means that something’s wrong) and punches in the code to his room. “Goodnight, Takashi,” he says softly, before retreating.

As the door slides closed, Shiro belatedly realizes that Adam is still wearing his tattered sweatshirt. Warm sparks bloom in his abdomen. He stumbles back to his room, opens the door, and throws himself onto his bed.

Staring up at the ceiling an hour later, Shiro still feels the ghost of Adam’s hot breath against his lips. He doesn’t know what to do about it. He groans, yanks the single meager Garrison-issue pillow over his head, and waits for sleep to take him.

* * *

When Shiro stumbles in for breakfast the next morning, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, it’s to find a package sitting neatly at his usual spot in the cafeteria. Allura and Romelle are sitting adjacent, chatting as Shiro collapses next to them.

“What’s this?” he asks, picking up the large brown envelope. The bulge inside gives when he presses on it.

“Dunno,” Allura says. “They called it for you when they did mail drop this morning.”

“Oh,” Shiro says, cheeks coloring. He didn’t even know that they did a mail drop in the mornings. It wasn’t like he was used to getting packages or letters. He tears open the envelope and pours the contents onto the table. Inside tumbles out a deep blue knit skinny tie, tags still clipped on, and a typewritten message.

_Dear Shiro,_

_Thanks for the note! No worries at all about not writing, I’m happy to hear you’re doing well and know how busy you must be. Meeting with the president next week – that’s exciting! And I’m pleased to hear that you’re excelling in your classes. It’s no surprise to me that you’re making friends and surpassing everyone’s expectations. Sounds like you and your new friend Adam have been having some interesting discussions. It’s good to hear that you’re staying current with the news and doing your own research and analysis. You’re a smart kid._

_You don’t have to thank me for helping you succeed. It’s my job, first of all, and second, seeing you do well is the biggest reward I could have gotten. I know life hasn’t always been smooth sailing for you, so knowing that you’re doing something that you love and excel at makes me very happy. And yes, of course I can coordinate with the Garrison to enroll you in their summer session. Based on what you’ve told me about your grades and rankings, I don’t think qualifying for further scholarships is going to be an issue at all._

_I’m sending a little gift along as a congratulations and good luck gift for the interview. I figured you could use some formalwear. I know you’ll be stellar. Be patient, be focused, and remember that what makes you great isn’t that you can do fancy flying tricks, it’s that you’re able to conquer anything in your path. You have always beat the odds. Greatness is not a character trait, it’s a badge you earn. And you, more than any person I’ve ever met, have earned it._

_I’ll be tuning in for the interview and sending good vibes your way._

_Nina._

Shiro blinks and folds the letter back down. He carefully tucks it back inside the envelope, along with the tie. It’s the first piece of formalwear he can remember owning. He thinks of Nina, driving him back and forth from Garrison entrance exams and interviews, radio turned low while they chatted about school and the news and the latest Beatles song. Nina, who kept granola bars in her glovebox that she offered to the kids she case managed for. Her beat-up car and folded Cosmo magazines. Giving everything she had to ragged teenagers who didn’t have anything.

_I will give everything to succeed,_ Shiro thinks as he sips his cup of weak, bitter Garrison-issue coffee. _I will be the light in the dark that I didn’t have._

Just a few feet away from him, Allura is reaching across the table to flick a piece of hair out of Romelle’s eyes. It’s a quick motion, so if someone looked twice it would have already passed. They could go on pretending they hadn’t seen anything. Romelle points her fork at Allura and laughs about something, Shiro isn’t really paying attention. He thinks of Ms. Carter and Commander Okybe, sitting pressed against each other on a tiny, rickety desk. How their shoulders bumped, like they were untouchable by anyone but each other. Of Adam’s face, furrowed when he stares at his homework, determined when he’s in flight, carefree when he’s driving a speeder through the Sonoran Desert.

Shiro thinks, _I know who I am now._

“Allura? Romelle?” he says, then lowers his voice. The buzz of the cafeteria covers his next words. “I think I’m gay.”

It’s a Tuesday, and tomorrow Shiro will step in front of a camera and be broadcasted across the world as he speaks about fighting the Red Tide and soaring into the stars. But right now, he is just a boy, and humans are vulnerable in a way that radio waves aren’t.

Allura stops talking mid-sentence, turning to take in Shiro’s worried face. “Okay,” she says slowly. “What do you want to do about it?”

Shiro fumbles for ground. “What?”

Romelle, her mouth full of cereal (raisin bran, perpetually stale) chimes in. “When are you going to make a move on Adam?”

A half-empty coffee cup clatters when it hits the table. Shiro stares at the puddle of weak coffee splattered over the table and running off the ends of the table. Reaching for napkins, he scrambles to clean up the mess he made, but it isn’t quick enough to keep half of his left leg from being turned a lovely shade of orange and brown.

“Shh!” Shiro hisses, scattering the napkins around the table before the coffee gets his left leg too. “That’s – no – he’s my best friend – I can’t ask him!”

Romelle gives him a pointed look, arms crossed over her chest while her blonde hair flutters from the creaking ceiling fans desperately trying to deliver them from the scorching heat.

“I think what she means,” Allura says, turning to Shiro and grabbing a new napkin to dab the coffee stain on his pants. “Is that you should talk to him about how you feel.”

Shiro balks, going to shake his head. Whatever is happening between him and Adam, he’s happy to leave it as whatever weird are-we-aren’t-we thing they’re having. What if he tells Adam and Adam doesn’t _like_ _like_ him back, or if Iverson finds out and he gets kicked out, or they lose their scholarships? Somehow, the idea of sneaking out with Adam and almost kissing him feels safer than telling him how he feels. If Shiro says it, there’s no taking it back. There’s no pretending. Nowhere to hide, the golden boy glimmering under the light of the sun, a modern-day David.

“I-“ Shiro starts, some inevitable protest rising like bile in his throat, but he’s interrupted by no other than Adam himself.

“Oh,” Adam says, standing at the end of the table. Shiro’s body feels like it’s been bathed in ice water. How long has Adam been standing there? How did Shiro not notice?

His eyes drop, and Shiro looks down to the spilled coffee and –

Allura’s hand, napkin crumpled under her palm, still resting on Shiro’s upper thigh.

“Sorry for interrupting,” Adam says, a steely tremor in his voice. “I’ll leave you be, I guess.” He turns around, shoulders rigid, steps quick as he just about bolts out the cafeteria door and into the hall.

“Shit shit shit shit,” Shiro hisses.

Allura is already picking up his bag and shoving it in his arms. “Go,” she instructs. “I’ll see you in flight dynamics.”

He’s halfway out the door when he hears Romelle’s cackling laugh behind him.

“Adam!” Shiro calls when he reaches the hallway, catching Adam halfway down the hall.

He freezes, and turns slowly, shoulders hunched. “No, really, it’s okay. I know – “

“You don’t.” Shiro is surprised by his own ferocity. Then, softer. “You don’t know.”

Adam is staring resolutely at the ground, and Shiro hears a voice in his mind that sounds suspiciously like Romelle telling him to make a move.

“Can we talk?” Shiro asks, then forces his legs into motion. “But not here.” Adam is still frozen when Shiro reaches his side. He turns to follow a half-step behind Shiro as they clatter down the stairs to the library. It’s empty when they reach it, Ms. Carter seeming to have telepathically realized that shit was going down and clearing out. Shiro pulls them behind a row of books.

Adam starts before Shiro can get a word in. “Tell me if this thing going on between us is actually a thing or if I’m imagining it? Because you’re really close with Allura and she keeps tugging you into broom closets and shit and I swear I don’t care, like I really don’t, because if it’s her you’re happy with then I’m happy for you, but I just have to.” His eyes are still trained on the ground. “Know.” An exhale settles his shoulders, glasses slipping down on his nose.

The last few months of gazing looks at Adam and heart palpitations at the sound of his laugh explode out of Shiro’s chest.

“Adam, I’m gay.”

Adam’s chin snaps up, eyes locking onto Shiro’s. “Oh,” he says, and it’s the same word he used when he saw Allura half bent across Shiro’s lap, but so much more hopeful.

“Allura helps organize a gay-straight alliance that meets a few times a month. She brought me to one of the meetings. There’s nothing happening between us, it’s.” Shiro pauses to take a breath and meets Adam’s eyes, wide and eager. Disbelieving. “It’s only you.”

“Oh,” Adam repeats, color flooding his cheeks. His mouth closes, and the shock fades from his eyes, replaced by something else. Mischief, perhaps. He tilts his head, just slightly, and presses himself a step closer to Shiro. They’re a foot away, the air between them vibrating. This feels like looking at a heat mirage in the desert, knowing what you’re looking at is there but hardly daring to believe it. Like looking at the stars, hundreds of light years away, and closing the gap with rockets, with satellites, with probes, with Adam closing the distance between himself and Shiro.

All at once, every star in the sky is six inches away from Shiro’s nose, grinning softly and asking in a teasing voice: “So, Takashi, are you going to kiss me or what?”

The stars collide. Their physics teacher would call it a supernova. Shiro calls it something else. Maybe he calls it love.

* * *

BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT

NBC LIVE SPECIAL

MAY 23 1962

MUSIC INTRO

ANCHOR 1: Welcome to NBC, America's #1 Network. News with no exception.

ANCHOR 2: Delivering nothing but the truth. Your news, our business.

MUSIC DOWN…FADE TO FEED 2…

ANCHOR 1 VOICE OVERLAY: Broadcasting live from the United States Space Exploration Garrison 001, deep in the Sonoran Desert of the Western United States. 

ANCHOR 2 VOICE OVERLAY: Good afternoon, America! Welcome back to our special live coverage of President Kennedy’s visit to this exclusive and high-tech base developing technology for future missions to space – the final frontier.

PAN TO INTERVIEW 

MUSIC RISE… HEADLINE “LIVE INTERVIEW”

ANCHOR 1 VOICE OVERLAY: Next, an exclusive interview with the President and star Garrison Cadet Pilot Takashi Shirogane.

MUSIC OUT… AUDIO TO FEED 2

COMMANDER IN CHIEF JOHN F. KENNEDY: Hello Mr. Shirogane and thank you for taking time out of your studies to speak with me today.

CADET TAKASHI SHIROGANE: The pleasure is mine, Mr. President.

KENNEDY: So, I’ve heard from the top officers at the Garrison Academy that you’re a rising star in the space exploration pilot program. They tell me that you’ve earned the nickname ‘SHIRO’ after having held the top spot in flight rankings all year. Can you give the viewers some insight to what the Garrison Cadet Program is like?

SHIROGANE: I’m honored, really, to have earned that nickname. The Garrison Cadet Program has been an important part of shaping who I am as an American. It’s given me opportunities that I wouldn’t have dreamed of before enrolling and I’m proud to serve my country. We have a pretty hard curriculum load, but a lot of it is centered around past and present historical context and skills we’re going to need as pilots or mission commanders, like astrophysics or flight dynamics. It’s interesting to learn about things that are applicable to what I want to end up doing, so even though the program is tough, it’s absolutely worth the hard work.

KENNEDY: Wow, a teenager who actually likes school. I couldn’t say the same for myself at your age. [laughter] What is it that you want to do someday, Shiro?

SHIROGANE: I’d like to go to space someday.

KENNEDY: Any particular part of space?

SHIROGANE: [pause] My dad used to tell me to shoot for the moon, and even if I missed, I’d still land among the stars. So I figure that if I don’t make the moon, I’ll just keep going. But yeah. Maybe the moon.

KENNEDY: The United States is pushing for an eventual moon landing, you know. And with pilots with talent and drive like yourself, I have no doubt that we’ll get there. So tell me, what is a normal day at the Garrison like?

SHIROGANE: Busy. [laughter] No, really! Not in a bad way, in a really good way, where it feels like I’m always learning. I start off my day in the cafeteria, and a few friends and I talk about what’s going on in the news. Then we’re in class for the next few hours, running from English composition to American history to astrophysics. Flight dynamic is my favorite class, four days a week we learn about theory and technical aspects of flight and piloting, and then once a week we do mission simulations.

KENNEDY: And I hear you’re quite good at the simulations.

SHIROGANE: I, uh, I guess. I don’t really think about how I’m scoring or ranking against other cadets, that’s not why I’m here. When I’m flying, it’s like the only thing that matters is me and my decisions. Everything else fades away, and I’m running off adrenaline and instinct. I don’t love being a pilot because I’m good at it, I’m good at piloting because I love it.

KENNEDY: Wise words. Who is one teacher who has most profoundly impacted your experience at the Garrison this year?

SHIROGANE: This isn’t the answer you think it’s going to be, but one of the staff librarians always sorts through the news and pulls the articles she knows I’m going to find most interesting on top so that I can read them before the day starts. It’s just one of those things that isn’t a huge act but feels monumental when you realize that people care and go out of their way to help you.

KENNEDY: I love to hear that. You’re certainly a smart young man, and on behalf of America, I can say that we’re proud of your hard work and success. Just one more question and I’ll let you get back to studying: If you could give one piece of advice to anyone thinking of applying for the cadet program, what would it be?

SHIROGANE: Oh wow, that’s a hard one. I mean, when I applied it was kind of a shot in the dark. I never really expected to make the program, and I certainly didn’t expect to end up, well, here! [chuckles] I’d say to anyone who wants to apply, to just do it. Know that it’s a challenging program, but if space exploration is something you find interesting, there’s definitely a place for you here as long as you’re willing to work for it. The other day, someone told me that greatness isn’t an innate trait, it’s something you earn. All you have to do is go, be great.

KENNEDY: Well, Shiro, thanks so much for speaking with me this afternoon. Thank you for your service.

SHIROGANE: It’s been an honor. Thank you, Mr. President.

MUSIC UP… FEED 2 FADE TO BLACK…

* * *

National Geographic ran an article on what causes a shark feeding frenzy. With an overload of prey, sharks go into an uncontrollable state where they thrash and bite uncontrollably, crazed with stimuli. During World War I and II, the Oceantip White Shark was believed to go into many a feeding frenzy when ships and submarines were torpedoed, drawn to the frantic splashing of people in the water. There were few survivors.

Shiro is the lone tuna, the flailing body, in a cafeteria full of blood-hungry sharks. When the cafeteria door slides open the following morning a hush falls over the room. Four hundred heads whip around in perfect unison when Shiro crosses the threshold in a freshly washed uniform and a notebook held tight to his chest.

He doesn’t know who starts the clapping, which is probably a good thing, because for a moment Shiro debates killing them. The whole room opens fire of thundering applause, and Shiro is swallowed whole by the sound and attention. Fellow cadets, officers he’s never met, and teachers alike all volley questions as Shiro stands thunderstruck in the doorway, conversation transforming into an uproar.

“What was it like meeting the President?” one voice calls from Shiro’s left.

“How does it feel to be on TV?” Another voice, straining to be heard over the loud chatter of the room discussing the Garrison’s golden boy.

“Did you meet the secret service?” Matt Holt shouts from the back, because of course he does.

Shiro feels very small and his chest very tight. He grapples for air for a half second, feeling the weight of his reputation sitting heavy on his throat, closing his airways and choking off his breath.

The sharks smell blood, and Shiro is the prey.

He doesn’t know what to do. Grab a tray and sit down at his table? Spin some concocted story about how he and the President chatted foreign policy over afternoon tea instead of being shoved into an uncomfortably soft armchair under fluorescent bulbs and instructed to “play the role” no matter what? What does he say about the President’s charismatic smile and firm handshake, his politician’s laugh at jokes from Garrison officers that weren’t funny at all, how he’d turned to Shiro and whispered under his breath ‘they never get any better at this, you know’? How before the interview began, the President had shaken his hand, buttoned his jacket, and told him that his best advice for interviews was to remember to smile between points?

Shiro played a role, an unknowing audition for a part he didn’t know he wanted until he’d already gotten it. And now, with everyone staring at the celebrity of the hour, he’s not even sure he wanted it to begin with.

Allura, god bless her, saves him from certain death in the cafeteria for the second time this week. She jumps up from her seat at the long benches, shoves her grimy orange meal tray at Romelle who sighs and gets to her feet, and closes the distance between herself and Shiro in a few broad steps.

“Hi everyone, I know this is exciting, but I need to borrow Shiro for a moment,” she shouts over her shoulder to the retreating crowd, grabbing Shiro’s bicep and yanking him out into the corridor.

Behind them, inside the cafeteria, he hears the sound of two plastic meal trays clapping together, followed by a suspiciously Romelle-sounding voice shouting: “Can you all stop GAWKING?”

Shiro makes a mental note to mail Romelle a fruit basket right after he gets Allura’s sorted from the whole roll-call-nuclear-drill incident. Or get to breakfast early tomorrow and get a cup of the strong coffee that runs out ten minutes in to breakfast. Basically, the same tier of gifts.

“You should probably stay out of the limelight for a little while, being the closest thing the Garrison has to a celebrity and all.” Allura tells him as she frog-marches him down the hallway and to the descending staircase. “We’re going to the library, where we can barricade ourselves from the masses.”

_No, wait, stop_ , Shiro thinks as Allura tugs him along _. I haven’t figured out what to do about the Adam thing_. They haven’t talked since they kissed in the library two days ago, pressed against battered copies of outdated flight manuals, hungry for each other in a way that only young people can be.

When they had broken apart, it had been one of those ‘well that’s that!’ kind of things. Breathless and panting, Adam had pulled away and stood there, just staring at Shiro for a moment. Then the class bell had rung, signaling that they had five minutes to scramble up two flights of stairs and be seated in their first classes. So, they’d grabbed their backpacks and ran, climbing up the stairs with hot puffs of breath that tasted like coffee and toast. Which Shiro knows, now, because he spent a few precious minutes prying the taste out of Adam’s mouth.

And then the interview had been yesterday, and Shiro had spent the whole day loitering in one of the offices on the top floor of the Garrison, watching officers lead President Kennedy and the news team across the shimmering tarmac while a woman wearing too much hairspray took scissors to Shiro’s runaway black locks.

Now, he’s here, getting shoved through the massive library doors while trying to swallow down the knot of nerves in his stomach. What is he supposed to do? How is he supposed to look Adam in the eyes and make words that aren’t ‘can we sneak off so I can stick my tongue down your throat again?’

Adam, of course, is leaning against the circulation desk, waving an article that looks like it had Shiro’s face on it and talking to Ms. Carter. At the sound of the doors sliding open, he spins around and freezes.

Shiro has a similar reaction. His legs just kind of. Stop working for a half second before Allura saves his ass for the second time today (this is becoming a trend) and jolts him back into motion.

“This moron decided to march right into the battlefield of the cafeteria this morning,” she announces. “We’re going to have so much fun prying his suitors off with a crowbar until everyone goes to summer and gets obsessed with something else.” Adam flinches imperceptibly at the mention of suitors. 

Allura rolls her eyes, tosses her backpack onto the floor next to the desk, and plucks the newspaper out of Adam’s limp grasp. He’s still staring at Shiro.

“Hey look, you made the front page of the national section of the Times!” She brandishes the photo toward Shiro, who _finally_ snaps out of his Adam-induced funk and joins Allura, Adam, and Ms. Carter at the desk to look at his face. It’s a picture of Shiro and Kennedy sitting on the (incredibly uncomfortable) interview chairs, mid-laugh. Shiro thinks it might have been the one time he showed an emotion that wasn’t complete terror the entire interview. The caps-lock headline reads “GARRISON GOLDEN BOY PROMISES HOPE FOR FUTURE OF US SPACE PROGRAM.”

“Wow,” Shiro says, skimming the article. “They’re really playing up the Golden boy thing. I haven’t even flown a real jet yet. I might be garbage. How stupid would everyone look then?”

Beside him, Allura and Adam snort out disbelieving scoffs at the same time.

“What?” Shiro cries. “They’re jinxing it!”

“Okay, space cadet,” Adam says in a voice so fond that Allura and Shiro snap their heads up at the same time. Adam’s cheeks color almost instantly.

A smirk grows over Allura’s face. “Oh, _space cadet_? Have you all finally figured your shit out?”

If it’s possible, the color on Adam’s cheeks darkens more. “Uh,” he says, looking at Shiro for guidance.

“All it took was a little heteroerotic jealousy in the cafeteria to get you to make a move? If I’d known it was that easy, I would have done it ages ago,” Allura continues, eyes sparkling. 

“It was that obvious?” Adam winces.

“You’ve been the bane of subtly this whole time,” Allura says with a snort. “I can’t believe you didn’t notice.”

A chill ripple courses through Shiro’s body. He might not have noticed Adam’s pining, and Adam may not have noticed his, but it seems like lots of other people did. Like Allura, Romelle, Ms. Carter, and – Iverson.

Shiro shoves the horrible ice pick in his chest down and forces a smile. “That obvious, huh?”

There’s a moment of silence that probably isn’t awkward for anyone but Shiro, who is looking down at the newspaper article where yesterday’s Shiro smiles up at him, pixelated and smudged. It’s fitting – an incomplete boy presented to the world.

“That reminds me,” Adam says suddenly, causing Shiro to jolt. “I owe you an apology, Allura. Like, a lot of apologies.” He takes a deep breath. “I might have… totally thought that you were into Takashi and was kind of a dick to you sometimes. So, I’m really, really sorry, not just because you’re not actually into Takashi, but on the principle that I was an asshole to you because I let my own judgements cloud my perception of you. And that’s not okay on any level. If you’d let me, could I have a second chance to be your friend?”

The crease between Adam’s brows is furrowed, his face still slightly flushed with embarrassment. His arms are at his side, fingers tapping on his thighs. It’s Morse code for SOS, Shiro realizes suddenly. Adam’s nervous tic is to signal SOS.

“You’re so stupid,” Allura says with a sigh, and steps forward to wrap her arms around Adam, folding him into a hug.

“Um,” Adam says, hands rising to tentatively pat her back. “I guess?”

“You helped me do so many physics assignments,” Allura says, “all the while staring at Shiro every three seconds. If I wasn’t a lesbian, I’d know he was taken anyways. Also, if that’s your version of being an asshole, you _really_ need to work on being rude.” Adam lets out a huff of laughter, squeezing her once before she pulls away and holds him by the shoulders. “There’s a GSA meeting next Monday night in Room 402. It’s –”

“Mr. Johnson’s class,” Adam interrupts. “Is he - ?”

“We’re everywhere, sweet, naïve Adam,” Allura says with a grin. “It’s at ten. Don’t get caught.” She spares a glance over Adam’s shoulder to look at Shiro, who is still thumbing the Times article. “Shiro, obviously, you’re invited too.”

Shiro tosses the article of his face across the circulation desk. “I’ll be there. Not to derail the conversation, which is really sweet, by the way, but what are we going to do about me being the Paul McCartney of the Garrison?”

Ms. Carter, who has been watching the whole time from around a pile of books she was ‘shelving.’ Her eyes are sparkling with delight, and Shiro sees that she’s pulled the necklace with her ring from under her shirt. It glimmers under the artificial light. “It’ll fade out by the beginning of next year, if I know anything from watching twenty years of students cycle through fads in these halls,” She calls. “Survive the next two weeks and you’ll have the summer to yourself. By the time that you start next year, you’ll have melted back into the walls when someone comes back with a nose job or something equally stupid.”

Overhead, the bell strikes, signaling their five-minute window to get to class. Shiro moves to grab his backpack off the floor, but Adam beats him to it, snatching the beaten black backpack off the floor and throwing it onto his other shoulder. His own, much fuller, backpack bumps against it.

Shiro opens his mouth to protest, but Adam beats him to that too. “No whining. And no, you can’t talk me out of this. Just try to remember us peons when you’re rich, famous, and live on the moon.”

They bustle out of the library, calling their goodbyes to Ms. Carter as they go. Romelle is standing at the top of the stairs, her books tucked against her chest and a grin waiting for Allura. Beside Shiro, the sleeve of Adam’s jacket brushes his shoulder.

“I couldn’t forget about you guys if I tried,” Shiro says, low enough that just Adam can hear. “And besides, you’re my copilot.”

He can hear the smile in Adam’s reply. “Damn right I am.”

* * *

The tarmac sizzles in the late May heat. A bead of sweat rolls down Shiro’s cheek, falling off his chin and splattering on his scuffed boots. Iverson stands before the pilot cadets, and behind Iverson stands a shining T-33 Shooting Star. The United States’ first turbo-powered combat aircraft that had inspired the likes of the Lockheed F-94 Starfire. The two-seater T-Bird had taken on the role of training pilots over the last three years after being phased out from combat use and was replaced by single-pilot, more maneuverable aircraft.

And today, Shiro is going to fly it.

“Listen up cadets,” Iverson crows, holding his beloved clipboard in his left hand. Shiro wonders if he sleeps with it. “You’ve been training for this moment all year. We’re going to be performing a test flight today, then you’ll be flying in duos for your final in two weeks. The top half of the class will be promoted to fighter status, the rest.” Iverson shrugs. “It’ll be time to find a new path.”

Shiro squints at the freshly painted aircraft in front of him. Everything he’s read about T-Birds cycles through his head like a caught VHS. Thirty-seven feet, nine inches. First T-33 model manufactured in 1948 as a training aircraft for the US Air Force. Maximum speed, 600 miles per hour. Range, 1275 miles.

“Today, I’ll be supervising your flight, but recognize that I’m looking for confidence, knowledge, and adaptability. And not crashing into the mountains, of course.” Iverson laughs, like it’s funny. Shiro supposes that part of being part of the military is a penchant for being close to death at all times. He thinks he may understand why Iverson smokes so heavily.

The afternoon breeze swirls around Shiro, heat drying a droplet of sweat before it can call. It’s as if the desert is exhaling a breath. He clenches one damp fist, and then releases. Down the row, he can see Matt Holt raising a tentative hand.

“Cadet Holt,” Iverson says. “Do you have a question?”

Matt looks stricken when Shiro leans slightly out of line to peek at his face. The few times that they’ve studied together, Matt always talks about how his dad had been an engineer, and how he wanted to be an engineer too, it was his little _sister_ who was supposed to be the pilot, except being a pilot paid considerably more than an engineer. Across the hush of a library table, Matt had told Shiro that he wanted to help his parents retire early. Shiro had nodded, thinking of his father’s grizzled hands on the wheel of a rattling bus, and wished that he was going through the program because he, too, had someone to come home to.

“Are we all flying today?” Matt forces out. “Sir.”

Call it lacking preparation, or maybe just his distaste for piloting, but Matt is staring up at the T-Bird as if it’s about to come to life, pluck him from the Earth, toss him into its gaping maw, and eat him alive.

Shiro can’t relate. He sees the simulator in front of him, hands on the controls, mind running on its own accord.

“We’ll be taking twenty-minute test flights. Half of you will fly today, and the other half tomorrow.” He can see Matt deflate with relief. “Today, the top fifteen cadets are at bat. Shiro, we’re starting with you.”

He swallows, meeting Iverson’s eyes as the commander surveys him. His eyes flicker back a familiar challenge – one that Shiro’s seen his entire life.

Are you strong enough to do this?

To start over, a new life every two years, bouncing from attic to spare rooms in houses that smiled at him out of pity and gave him a pat on the shoulder as a birthday present. To smile at his social worker when she informed him that she was so sorry, but he was going to be changing school districts again. To say goodbye to people that Shiro knew he’d never see again and be okay with that.

To be the lone gay Japanese orphan at a military school full of sons of diplomats. To study for tests his battered textbooks never prepared him for in high school. To grab the controls of the simulator, to grab control of his life, and point it in a different direction.

To be the first to step inside the cockpit of a real-life jet, to scrape clouds with the belly of a jet, to feel the hum of the engine in his whole body, thousands of feet above the sizzling desert heat.

He steps forward. He doesn’t look to his left, where Adam stands at attention. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t say goodbye. He steps inside the cockpit behind Iverson, straps the helmet on, and flexes his fingers around the controls. This is what he was trained to do. This is what he was born to do.

The first time that Shiro flew the simulator, he thought he finally understood what it meant to be hungry for something. The ache in his belly to be behind the controls of a real plane, skimming along the horizon, instead of the cracking interior of a simulator. He doesn’t know how he knew that he was going to love flying, only that it was like the taste of blood in his mouth – foreign, but still familiar in a way that feels like a part of him. Something he might have guessed was there but never dared bite his lip hard enough to taste.

The day that Shiro realized he liked Adam, he knew what it felt like to be hungry for a person. To want them to fill your bones with laughter. To sacrifice sleep for the sake of conversations, sneak out of rooms to meet in illuminated hallways, race through the desert on the back of borrowed time.

Now, flying fifteen thousand feet above the Sonoran desert, and having kissed Adam against the wall of the third story boy’s restroom not even an hour ago, Shiro finally feels the perpetual ache quiet. 

* * *

Pressing open the door to Room 402, light spills onto Shiro’s hands, arms, jacket while the voices inside fall hush. Half a step behind him, Adam is clutching the hem of his jacket, shooting a quick glance over his shoulder back down the hallway before stepping inside of the bright of the room behind Shiro.

It’s a surprisingly large group, given that they’re heading into finals week, kids flung over couches holding flashcards and highlighted notes.

“Shiro! Adam!” Romelle calls from her perch on the arm of a beaten red couch. Allura is laying on the couch below her, a textbook open and placed on her face while she groans a greeting. The chatter around them continues, but despite a few quick glances the rest of the room continues on their own conversations.

That’s a far cry from how the days following the interview have been, where everywhere Shiro goes he feels the burning of eyes into his back and the whispers that trail his steps in the halls. To make matters worse, Iverson keeps popping up to tug Shiro into meetings where he talks about next year’s classes and some of the summer programs he wants him to take part in. The rational part of his brain tells him that Iverson is just looking out for his future, but it always seems that Iverson is yanking him away at times where him and Adam, Romelle, and Allura are trying to hang out, like the breaks between classes and during lunch.

But here, there is no Iverson, no demeaning hallways, and no reputation to uphold.

Someone’s slung a hand-stitched pride flag across the table in the middle of the room. On top of it is a few boxes of grocery-store cookies, a rare treat since the nearest market is an hour’s trek away.

Shiro shoves Allura’s feet over and plops down onto the couch. Adam hovers near Romelle, glancing around the room with an expression mixed with surprise and apprehension. “Watcha’ reading?” He plucks the book from off of Allura’s face and examines the dog-eared copy of _The Dummy’s Guide to Shakespearian Dialectics._

“Osmosis,” Allura groans.

“Actually,” Romelle corrects from above her, “it would be diffusion. Osmosis is only the transfer of water.”

“Actually,” Shiro chimes in, “if you read any of the plays, maybe you wouldn’t be stressing about this.”

Allura shoots him a glare, squinting in the fluorescents. “Actually, fuck both of you.”

Adam finds his voice, apparently over his initial shock of finding out just how many Garrison personnel were queer. “I’m with Allura. Shakespeare sucks.”

Shiro tosses his hands. “We’ve talked about this! Shakespeare is about ambition! Power! Hubris! Murder! Horatio was _so_ gay!”

“Shelley!” Comes a call from across the room. Ms. Carter is sitting cross legged on the desk with the pride flag, Commander Okybe resting against her while seeming to mark papers. “What’s better than the female founder of the sci fi genre?”

From beside her, apparently tuning in to the conversation, Commander Okybe mutters, “Jack London, that’s who.”

“You’re all hopeless,” Adam groans. “Wrong genre, all of you. Walt Whitman. _Leaves of Grass_ is one of the most confessional collections of American poetry in history, let alone one of the gayest.”

Whitman, who Adam talks about while hanging upside-down on his bed, reading lines of poetry and muttering half of them aloud. Prodding Shiro’s shoulder and saying ‘listen to this,’ before telling him a line. Sometimes going on about the prose. Adam was never a huge fan of English, or writing, or really poetry, but after he did a project on Whitman at the beginning of the semester, he hadn’t been able to put the guy down.

It wasn’t until Adam kissed him that he really understood why. Whitman’s uniquely American voice, echoing with the song of the self, speaking in riddles that unwound for Adam, for Shiro, for all the people in this specific room. To be a pioneer of American literature, to be gay, to seek identity and meaning – Adam’s love for Whitman’s poetry wasn’t about a sudden interest in iambic pentameter, but about a shared experience. 

Somehow, his thoughts drift back to his conversation with Iverson. Keeping his patriotism in line as to not jeopardize his career. He looks at the flag, draped across the table, while the American flag pinned to the chalkboard fluttered in the breeze of the ceiling fan. Two rippling pieces of fabric, existing in the same space.

The room does not explode. Shiro tests the weight of the words in his mouth. _Gay. American. Gay; American. Gay, American. Gay American._

One sentence.

He feels it, pinned to the lapel of his jacket, engrained in his mornings. Flashing a smile on national TV. An identity as loud as the fire engine red, rippling blue, starlight white painted onto his jet. To be two things at once, two bold things that were magnetic opposites until you brought them together. Roughly every one-thousand years, the poles switch, and magnets are reversed. The unlikely is brought together and unified.

An American flag, and rainbow one. Laying, side by side, in the walls of a classroom. Settling, side by side, in Shiro’s chest.

* * *

Eight.

Shiro, tired from staying up late at the GSA meeting the night before, falls asleep at breakfast in the cafeteria. He wakes up to the smell of strong coffee, which makes him think he’s dreaming (yes, the Garrison issue stuff _is_ just that bad). He may well have been dead, because when he peels his eyeballs open and fumbles for the brew, an angel is standing in his bleary vision. A caution-cone orange, wild-haired, moderately grumpy looking angel.

Adam, who had gotten Matt Holt to re-engineer the coffee machines to make stronger coffee by letting him into the kitchen using the swiped door codes. Adam, who had ditched his morning routine to make sure that Shiro got a strong cup of hot coffee before one of the officials noticed that their beverages didn’t take like dirt water and reset the machines. Adam, who sat and briefed Shiro, Allura, Romelle, and Matt on the morning news while they all ate breakfast and conversed in varying levels of consciousness.

Adam, who gave Shiro his notes to borrow for his first class and slipped a note inside reading ‘kick history’s ass, space cadet! :)’ that Shiro found hidden between the third and fourth pages.

Adam’s smile, like honey, from across the room.

* * *

Seven.

“I want to come with you,” Adam pants, having chased Shiro down the hall to the locker rooms to change for his run. “Put me in, coach!”

His teasing smile, which slipped to a grimace, which slipped to outright complaining as they jogged further and further around the red dirt track. Until eventually, Adam sat on the side of the 400-meter mark and did crunches while Shiro jogged around and around and around and –

* * *

Six.

Another flight with Iverson, Shiro’s brow still sweaty from the stale air of the cockpit and the heat of the helmet as he watches Adam hop into the pilot’s seat after Iverson. The roar of the engines as they heat up, then the violent gust of wind as the plane edges into gear, then races across the shimmering asphalt, then leaps from the ground and into the sun while the rest of the cadets watch.

Shiro squints into the sun as he watches the jet take a leisurely lap around the base of the McDowell mountains, giant black raven of a shadow tracing the same path that Shiro’s speeder has taken many a time.

When Adam stumbles out, sweaty and breathless, grinning ear to ear as Iverson bellows “NEXT” and Allura disappears into the cockpit, it takes everything Shiro has to keep himself from yanking Adam into a kiss.

But later, of course, he makes up for that.

* * *

Five.

English literature final. Shiro stumbles through the poetry section, sending out a silent apology to Adam, who is scribbling furiously across the room. It’s EE Cummings, who Shiro has heard of peripherally but is no Whitman, as far as he’s concerned. He writes something about the sweetness of endings, because the poem has something about stars and death in it, which is the only irony he appreciates in poetry.

He thinks of the evenings spent tucked into the library by his friends, bickering about school, and the news, and whether or not John McCormack was doing a shitty job as the new Speaker of the House.

(“He looks like a sunken in skeleton!” Romelle had whined.

“All old white dudes do,” Adam had gravely replied.)

So what if he doesn’t understand iambic pentameter? He has people that will explain it to him. He doesn’t have to do it alone anymore.

* * *

Four.

_history immeasurably is wealthier by a single day’s sweet death_

The last breath of daylight is on the lips of the horizon. The rest of the sky has turned ink and navy, speckles of stars starting to freckle the sky. The desert in front of them beckons, the yawning mouth of the canyons in the distance whispering sweet promises as the desert wind whips by. Adam’s arms are loosely cinched around Shiro’s waist, the rest of his body pressed against Shiro’s back as he watches the brush fly by.

When they settle on top of the tall outcropping, smuggled pudding cups and thermoses full of lukewarm coffee, a blanket of dark has been pulled over the sky. Shiro and Adam are tucked in under the stars, Adam laughing as Shiro tells him about the time that he hid his foster father’s boxers in the freezer and passed the blame onto his asshole foster brother. Then Shiro, listening carefully while Adam runs through his summer itinerary – at least an hour a week laying on the beach in Santa Monica, taking his sister to the Getty Villa and plucking grapes off the vines trailing at ancient Roman terrace, getting carne asada tacos from the street vendors in downtown Pasadena, sharing his grandmother’s _kanafe_ with the neighbors at a block party. It all sounds so much like the image of suburbia that Shiro’s conjured that it’s hard for him to believe that for Adam, it’s all real.

He doesn’t have to move families this summer or worry about transferring schools. For Adam, home is a blessed place, where you know how the front door lock sticks and the living room rug is always stained in the same spot.

But at least Shiro has somewhere to call home now. Even if it isn’t just one house address. It’s his Garrison bunk, where the walls have been covered with cut-out articles that Romelle helped him paste up. It’s behind the yoke of a T-Bird, flying so fast that his bones rattle. It’s inside a classroom after hours, laughing with people who share one collective secret that they refuse to apologize for. It’s Allura, elbowing him between the ribs to stay awake during astrophysics then snickering when he leaps out of his chair in surprise. It’s a pair of warm brown eyes, soft tan skin, and plush lips that taste like paper and coffee.

It isn’t even better than nothing. It’s something.

* * *

Three.

He’s cramming for astrophysics in the crowded library, stuffed full of students flipping wildly through notes and throwing highlighters in every direction. Everywhere Shiro looks, the fear of God and quadratic equations is etched into everyone’s faces. Allura and Adam are being asked questions every other minute. Shiro is rereading the first problem for the umpteenth time and making a massive lead smudge in the margin of the review worksheet, uncomprehending.

Matt Holt comes over and sits next to him, dark circles under his eyes emulsifying as he pulls a messy notebook out of his backpack and throws it onto the table. He opens it, plucks Shiro’s pencil from his hand, and starts writing on a blank sheet of paper.

“You have to start by calculating velocity,” he declares, and Shiro jumps from his daze.

“Huh?” he says.

Matt repeats himself, then looks at Shiro and passes the pencil back to him. “How many times have you helped me out on flight theory or given me simulator tips? I’m telling you that you have to start with a velocity calculation for number one.” He gives Shiro an expectant look.

“Oh,” Shiro says, and then looks down at the problem, where the lead spot has turned into a lead smudge. “Oh!” He scribbles down the velocity formula.

“Okay,” Matt continues. “The next thing you need to do is …”

* * *

Two.

The air always smells like cigar smoke. At this point, Shiro is pretty sure that he smells it in his nightmares. Iverson is puffing away and flicking through an open file on his desk, Shiro sitting nervously on the other side of the desk.

“Provided that you pass your final exams, I don’t see a reason why you couldn’t stay at the Garrison this summer and intern with Commander Okybe.” He clears his throat. “A captain position in your sights, Shirogane?”

“Yessir.”

“Do you still have the keys to the speeder?”

“Uh. Yes, sir.”

“Keep them.”

Shiro lets out an anxious breath. “Thank you, sir.”

* * *

One.

Adam lays beside him on the wrinkled sheets of his tiny twin bed. Adam’s hair is tousled from Shiro’s hands raking through it, his lower lip a shade darker pink from the press of Shiro’s lips. Shiro’s shirt is half undone, and he’s almost positive that he’s missing a button from how hard Adam yanked when he was trying to wrestle Shiro out of it.

“So,” Adams says to the quiet of the heavy evening air. “Two more days of first year, huh?”

Shiro just nods beside him and thinks, ‘two more days of you.’

“Then three months of summer,” Adam continues.

Shiro thinks, ‘three months without you.’

“Just our final flight tomorrow, and then exam results.” He pauses. “I really hope I pass tomorrow.”

“Of course you will,” Shiro reassures him, voice heavy with exhaustion.

“Yeah, but we don’t get to choose our partners. What if I end up with Matt or something?” Adam winces. “No offence to Matt, he just really should have followed the engineering track.”

Shiro just hums back.

“He said that he was going to request a program transfer,” Adam says. “Which is, like, definitely good for him. And that means that he can be our inflight engineer on missions.”

Shiro hums again.

“And there’s no way that Allura won’t pass the flight exam, she’s like you - flying comes naturally. Romelle has the grades to stay in even if she has a shaky flight, which probably won’t happen because she’ll eat her partner alive if they do anything stupid. And obviously you’re going to come in first, even if you were partnered with a sentient rock or something. You’re brilliant like that. It’s just.” He takes a shaky breath. “It’s just me.”

Shiro unfurls an arm from where it was resting on his stomach and whaps Adam on the chest without so much as opening his eyes. He hears a soft ‘oof’ from beside him when the back of his palm connects with Adam’s solid muscle.

“Shut up, Adam. You’re going to fly the shit out of whatever they throw at you tomorrow, no matter who you’re partnered with. You have great grades, there’s no way anyone beat your lit exam score with how much you had to say about a damn EE Cummings poem, you teach astrophysics better than Professor Montgomery, and you’re a brilliant pilot who has just convinced himself otherwise.”

When he doesn’t get a response, Shiro cracks open an eye, peering to the side to look at Adam. Adam has turned his head, no longer staring at the yellow-paper-star-decorated ceiling and gazing at Shiro’s face instead.

“What?” Shiro mumbles. “’S true.”

Adam opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but then he swallows down the words and leans over Shiro’s body instead, draping himself across Shiro’s chest. He evens their lips together, breathing words onto Shiro’s lips.

“You,” he says, closing the gap to press their lips together, firmly, once. “Are the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”

“Oh?” Shiro says, opening both eyes. Adam (sans glasses, which were tossed haphazardly onto the night stand a few hours ago out of fear that they’d be destroyed when Adam pushed Shiro backwards onto the bed and leaned in close to - ) hovers above, eyes half shut. “I could say the same.”

“I said it first,” Adam argues, and Shiro opens his mouth to protest, but he’s sidetracked by Adam’s kiss, and Adam’s smell, and the feeling of one of Adam’s hands burying itself into his hair and the other ghosting his jaw.

Later, when he’s laying against Adam’s sleeping side, lights turned out, nose tucked into the junction of his collarbone, he whispers the words into the warmth of Adam’s skin.

_I love you, I love you, I love you._

* * *

Zero.

It’s an unnaturally warm morning – which is saying something, because the Sonoran Desert is not known for mild summers. Shiro stands on the tarmac, freshly washed Garrison uniform growing evermore damp as he starts to sweat. The rest of the cadets mill around, chatting amongst themselves and offering encouragement as they wait for Iverson and the rest of the evaluation panel.

The T-Bird shimmers before them, not twenty feet away, beckoning. Shiro’s hands itch for the yoke, eager to get the flight test over with. This is their last exam – just one fifteen-minute partner flight stands between him and the end of his first year. Tomorrow, results will be posted, with the top ten cadets progressing to the second-year pilot program. The rest will either opt to transfer into different programs, like Matt’s change to engineering, or be dropped from the program.

Shiro imagines Iverson’s level stare and the mantra he’s repeated time after time. “There is no room for mediocracy here.”

“You ready, golden boy?” A hand claps onto Shiro’s shoulder. Adam is grinning behind him, looking sharp in his own orange and gray jacket.

“Never,” Shiro smiles back.

There is no trace of Adam left on Shiro’s body, but he is on his sheets, hanging in his closet, rattling in his bones. They had spent the night tucked against each other, two warm bodies beating with all the fervor of teenage love. When dawn had broken, Adam had pressed a kiss to Shiro’s forehead and gone back to his room. Shiro fell back asleep to pillows that smelled like Adam.

He doesn’t know what they are, really. They’re not friends, not boyfriends, hovering in the purgatory of skinny love. Shiro knows how he feels about Adam, and he thinks he knows how Adam feels about him. What comes next is just a formality, really.

But not now. Not with Iverson hovering over Shiro’s left shoulder and a news camera pointed over his right. Not now, first year decisions ready to be made. He doesn’t know when ‘now’ will be. But here, sweating on the tarmac next to someone that Shiro would trust with his life, he knows that he’ll make ‘now’ break dawn on the horizon.

Speak of the devil and he shall come. Iverson bursts out of Hangar 6, clipboard in hand (did Shiro expect otherwise? No.) and four evaluators behind him. Shiro doesn’t recognize any of them, which means that they’ve probably been flown in for nonbiased results, given that Shiro has shaken the hands of just about every upper-rank staff member in the facility.

Which is definitely mind-boggling to think about.

The cadets scrabble into a hastily formed line, raising their right hands to salute Iverson and his posse as they approach. Iverson looks back, eyebrow raised, as if to say ‘see? well trained.’ This is the military, Shiro reminds himself. Controlling the population through domination is a requirement.

“At ease, cadets.”

In chilling unison, thirty-two hands drop and fall to their sides.

Iverson gestures to the jet in front of them. “Today, you’ll be partnered up to do a duo flight in the T-33 Shooting Star. You will start the plane, take off, climb to five thousand feet, loop around the peak of Mt. McDowell, fly back, and land the jet. Cadets will be marked based on their execution of this task, adherence to guidelines, and cooperation with their copilot. Understood?”

Thirty-two heads nod.

“First up is going to be Shirogane-”

_Okay_ , Shiro thinks, _I wanted this to be over with anyways._

“-and Waseb.”

He stands shock still. Iverson paired him with _Adam?_ That was the last thing he saw coming.

Four cadets to his right, Adam takes a step forward. Shiro, dreamlike, feels his own feet moving forward and approaching Iverson.

The flood of nerves from his first duo flight – the one with Allura, in the simulator, all those months ago – comes rushing back. Flying with Iverson wasn’t scary. It was almost like there were no stakes. If something went wrong, Iverson could fly them out of it. But now? Not only flying with another cadet, but _Adam_ locks Shiro’s breath in his chest.

He shakes Iverson’s hands methodically. Iverson offers no encouragement, no reassuring smile. Just a crisp handshake and a nod. Business as usual.

As he steps off the asphalt and climbs into the cockpit of the old T-Bird, Shiro names the growing feeling in his chest.

Fear.

He buckles in, clipping the chest and lap belts and giving one tight tug before settling. Behind him, Adam does the same. His fear rattles like a caged bird. The T-Bird rattles to life.

He pulls the helmet over his head, clipping the helmet strap and switching on the comms. A moment later, he hears Adam’s short puffs of breath come through the line. His mind flashes back to twelve hours ago, feeling that same breath against his skin, neck, lips. Shiro reaches forward and grabs the yoke, giving it an experimental tug.

“Okay,” he mutters, mostly to himself. “Let’s do this.”

Here’s the thing. Shiro has never been afraid to fly before. Anxious, maybe. Excited, certainly. But the metallic taste of fear, the feeling of an Allen wrench cranking in his gut, is new. Seeing Adam out of the corner of his eye, running a perfunctory glance over the safety gauges on the dashboard and knowing that they’re about to hinge both of their lives on their ability to keep a four-ton hunk of metal in the air for fifteen minutes? It’s fear.

Adam speaks from behind him. “Hey,” he says, voice distorted through the shitty comms, but still distinctly familiar. “Copilots for life, remember? We can do this.”

Shiro swallows and nods. “Yeah,” he says back. “Yeah.”

“You’re nervous,” Adam states. Fact.

“No.” Lie.

“It’s you, me, and a jet. You’ve done both before.”

An incredulous snort slips out before Shiro can stop it. When he looks at Adam, he’s grinning through the smudges on his helmet.

“Yeah?” he teases, drawing out some of the fear from Shiro’s gut. “Let’s fly it like we stole it and stick it to Iverson that gay kids are the best pilots in the United States military.”

“Okay,” Shiro says. “Right.” He leans forward and radios ground control, which is just Iverson, the other thirty cadets, and the rest of the evaluation panel now standing in the shade in the shadow of Hangar 6.

“Ground control, this is T one oh nine seven requesting permission for takeoff.”

The radio crackles to life and Iverson’s voice comes through it. “T one oh nine seven, you are cleared for takeoff. Have a safe flight.”

He doesn’t have to ask Adam if he’s ready again. He’s already powering up the engines, calling out readings on engine power. “Throttle on,” Shiro says. The plane creeps forward, wheels rolling across the scorched earth.

“That’s weird,” Adam says. He heard Adam whack something behind him.

“What?” Shiro asks, half listening and half trying to steer the unwieldy jet toward the runway. He’s having a hard time getting it straight. Go figure.

“Engine two doesn’t have a power reading, but it’s on.”

“Must be a sensor malfunction,” Shiro replies, lining up the nose of the jet with the yellow dashed lines down the runway. “T-Birds are training jets, who knows how old this thing is and how often they bother to do superficial maintenance.” He gestures to the peeling paint on the sides of the cockpit.

Adam pauses before replying. “Yeah,” he says. He revs engine two, and it rumbles back. Then, more confidently; “Pretty sure it’s operating fine. Let’s get this show on the road.”

He coaxes the throttle down, and the cockpit begins to rattle as the jet crawls, then rolls, then races down the runway. The air rushing past them roars as the T-Bird gathers speed. Shiro clutches the yoke between two bone-white knuckles, arms clenched with the effort of keeping the plane straight as they rocket upwards of hundreds of miles an hour.

Before him, McDowell looms, a taunting peak that glitters from the salt deposits that twist through the rock. Long, reaching vines that wink in the sun, forcing Shiro to squint as he hauls up on the climbing control at Adam’s command. The front tires rear off the pavement, the yellow stripes between her rubber wheels gaping – one inch, three feet, twenty feet.

They’re airborne before Shiro has the chance to exhale. The familiar swoop of rapid ascent tosses his stomach and shoots adrenaline through his veins. His eyes narrow as the nose of the plane tilts up past the glimmering mountains and directly toward a cloudless sky, yawning as it beckons two teenage pilots and a rickety training aircraft.

But then, they back off the throttle, and the nose lowers, and Shiro jogs the left- and right-wing flaps to bank back and forth, and they’re _flying._

Through the comms in his helmet, and also faintly from behind him, Adam’s voice comes, incredulous.

“Sorry Takashi, but this is no speeder.”

Below them, the flecks of sagebrush grow ever smaller blurs as the T-Bird continues her climb. The McDowell mountains are growing closer, larger, no longer distant geometric pinpricks of light, now actual ridges of rock and sand.

“Copy that,” Shiro breathes back, pressing a gloved hand to the shaking windows. He feels that strike in his chest again, love. Pride. That feeling where he finally knows what he’s doing and where he belongs. Adam, reading off stats behind him while Shiro adjusts altitude and levels off their climb. Where the shaking of the yoke doesn’t scare Shiro, just excites him with the promise of adventure. The American flag painted in chipped paint on the wings, the same flag that flew in a classroom full of queer Garrison personnel. The heroes of America, laughing under a rainbow flag.

They continue on like that for a few miles, talking shop and throwing in casual observations every now and then.

“Cruising altitude of nine oh hundred feet reached.”

“Steadying ascent.”

“Wing tilt left. Yoke’s sticky.”

“Backing off acceleration – oh hey, there’s the rock we stargazed on – deceleration complete.”

“Hold – oh my god, it looks so different from up here – steady.”

Mc Dowell grows ever larger. He points the nose to the left of the peak, planning to bank left around and then a straight flight back. They could lay on the accelerator too, break the record for fastest first year flight. Shiro taps his pointer finger against the speedometer, which is starting to malfunction and wobble precariously between readings.

“Hey Adam, are you having an issue with your speedometer?” Shiro calls back. He whacks the reader with his fleshy part of his fist. Unsurprisingly, it does nothing to fix the problem. But the T-Bird doesn’t feel like it’s wobbling on speed though. Probably just another shitty meter, which seems to be the theme of this plane. “C’mon girl,” Shiro whispers to the jet. “Hang in there.”

All of that warm feeling that Shiro had fifteen seconds ago goes rushing out of his body when Adam’s tight voice comes through the comms. “I’m not getting a good read at all. And that engine two is doing something weird with the power again.”

_Okay_ , Shiro thinks. _Iverson wouldn’t send us out in a failing jet. We’ve flown this kind of stuff before in the simulators._

Except, when engine two stalls a half second later and they start falling into a tailspin, Shiro gets this sick jolt that it probably isn’t a planned maneuver.

“Shit,” Adam swears, “shitfuckfuckfuck.” He grabs onto the engine one control and nearly cuts the power, taking the plane out of its spiral and managing to steady them to a wobbly horizon.

Shiro hauls on the yoke and slaps the wing panels to climb.

But cut power to engine two apparently extends to cut power to the entire right _wing._ The T-Bird banks left hard, throwing Shiro against the right side of the cockpit. His helmet slams into one of the seat reinforcement bars hard enough to make Shiro black out for a moment, the world covered in a curtain of black before Adam’s voice comes through his helmet, piercing the darkness and shaking him back into consciousness.

“-Come in. Takashi, _please_ come in.”

He heaves himself back upright into his seat. His vision clears slowly, still hazy from the head and concussion of pitching his head against a reinforced steel bar. His knuckles are still white, but no longer from excitement. The plane is still banking hard left, and the whole cabin is starting to smell like smoke. He grunts, feeling a trickle of blood? sweat? down his left cheek. “’m okay. What’s our status on engine two?”

“Fuck, don’t _do_ that, you asshole.” Adam’s voice is a rush of relief. And then – more worried – “We completely lost power in engine two. The stalled engine is starting to spark – I think it’s an electrical malfunction, which would explain why I was getting those weird reading before takeoff. Fuck, I should have known something was wrong. And we’re still banking hard left and leaking fuel.”

Shiro takes a deep breath. He tastes the acrid vapors of gasoline and the metallic sting of blood. “Don’t be stupid, this isn’t your fault. I’m pretty sure the Garrison isn’t supposed to send us out in flying bombs as a first-year examination,” he says, giving the yoke a strong pull right to counterbalance the spin and leveling out the nose. His head is pounding. His vision is still speckled with stars. Every thought feels truncated and hazy, but he isn’t so out of it that he realizes they’re much, much too close to the incoming mountain ridge.

“Pull UP!” Adam shouts into the comms. Shiro hauls up on the yoke, and the plane starts to shake, as if being torn apart by the hands of a wrathful god. The left-wing flap engages, lifting the side of the plane and finally putting some air under their wings.

Adam slams the accelerator before Shiro gets the chance to shout it out. He knows exactly what Shiro’s trying do – to get the plane to rise up enough to clear the mountain using their one function engine and wind flap. If they can even clear the mountain ridge, they’ll be able to avoid being exploded into a thousand fiery pieces on the rock face.

For one horrible second, the T-Bird groans, like she doesn’t have the life left in her to climb, but then the engines whine and the top of the cockpit window shows a snippet of that cheery pale blue sky.

The sensors are blaring off all around them, and the smell of engine combustion is getting stronger and stronger. Shiro coughs, choking on the fumes. Another flurry of stars bursts into his vision and he barely keep his knuckles clenched around the yoke.

“We’re too close,” he chokes out, watching the window of sky grow, but not nearly quick enough. “We’re either going to clip the top of the ridge or get blown up by this fucking engine fire.” Shiro twists around to look at Adam, who has his lower lip clamped between his teeth while one fist clenches the throttle and the other the altitude meter. “We need to bail.”

Adam meets his eyes for a moment, rich caramel searching aching brown. “Yeah,” he says. Then, more resolute. “Prepare for immediate parachute ejection.”

Shiro twists back around, yanking once on his seatbelt to make sure it hadn’t sprung free when he’d been knocked against the side of the aircraft. He shoves his hand under the seat, finding the faded black vinyl strap with the words “EMERGENCY EJECT” embroidered in Garrison orange.

“Hey Takashi?” Adam suddenly says from behind him, voice oddly calm. “I know we’re going to be fine, but before we do this, there’s something I want to tell you-”

Shiro pulls the strap taut. One sharp tug and he’ll be catapulted into the air with a billowing orange cloud behind him to slow his fall.

“Now isn’t like, the best time, Adam,” Shiro says, releasing the yoke with his other hand. “Let’s disengage together. On my count. Three, two -”

“-I’m in love with you,” Adam finishes, and his voice is tight, tight the way the steering on the plane has gotten with limited controls, tight the way Adam’s voice gets when he’s about to cry.

Shiro doesn’t pull the release. The McDowell mountains grow closer. It’s Pompeii, but instead of the mountain tumbling toward them, they’re the ones racing toward it.

He twists around again. Adam has this stupid sheepish smile on his face and is holding the emergency release cord in his left hand. His dangling release cord. His unattached, deactivated release cord.

Out of the corner of Shiro’s eye, he can see the salt deposits flash by the window, close enough to be entire star systems etched into the rock. The lovers of Pompeii caught tangled in each other in the moment of violence. The earth, plucking the living from the air and entombing them in her arms.

“One,” Adam says, and leans forward. Shiro sees it. The certainty in Adam’s eyes. Certain like raising his hand in physics, certain like interpreting the morning foreign policy news, certain like the way he kisses Shiro.

He barely has time to react. His hand meets Shiro’s halfway, each of their fists clenching the rope. Like tug-of-war, like third graders on a playground with the tattered remains of their pride clutched between sweaty fists.

“No,” Shiro replies, just as sure. Sure as rattling off Revolutionary War history, sure as flying across the desert on the speeder, sure like the way he feels about Adam. He yanks the strap from Adam’s reach. “Not without you. Not when you _tell me you love me for the first time_ and don’t plan on letting me say it back, _you absolute ass_.”

He spins back around to the yoke. Left hand. Right hand. The mountains beckon. And death – the floating exit sign that Shiro has always imagined at the end of the hallway of his life – seems to be glowing on the surface of McDowell.

Some people survived Pompeii. Someone had to write history, after all.

Shiro jams the acceleration, yanks the jet left, and she falls like a moth plucked from the sky. Twisting and yearning away from the mountain face, nearly pointing straight to the ground.

But back in front of them, the endless desert reaches, her rippling sand and tiny brush beckoning. He waits for the moment that pure blind instinct tells him will come. If they’re lucky – and he means _really damn lucky –_ he can maybe smash the belly of the plane into the desert and create a runway out of sagebrush and sedimentary rock. And then, if belly-flopping at a couple hundred miles per hour doesn’t kill them on impact, maybe they’ll get lucky and the engine two fire won’t obliterate them either.

Hey, it’s still a better shot than flying the T-Bird into the mountain face and crumpling like a diet coke can.

“Drop landing gear. Full throttle on my count,” Shiro calls. Adam lets out an incredulous huff, which is pretty amazing given that they’re currently in a free-fall to their possible death.

“I can’t believe you!” Adam shouts back. Shiro hears the groan of the wheels folding down. He lifts the wing flap and prepares to pull up. “You’re going to get yourself killed. For fucks sake, Takashi, EJECT!”

_Not without you_ , Shiro thinks.

He starts the count again, but this time it isn’t to pull a faulty strap and slowly drift to the ground. The ground hurtles toward them. Shiro shouts “NOW!” and yanks the yoke at the same millisecond that Adam pins the screaming throttle.

The last thing he sees before his vision goes black like a bruise is the familiar cloudless sky stretching over a beckoning desert.

And then, nothing at all.

* * *

BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT

NBC BREAKING NEWS

JUNE 03 1962

MUSIC INTRO

ANCHOR 1: Welcome to NBC, America's #1 Network. News with no exception.

ANCHOR 2: Delivering nothing but the truth. Your news, our business.

MUSIC DOWN…FADE TO FEED 2…

ANCHOR 1 VOICE OVERLAY: Broadcasting live from Los Angeles, California.

ANCHOR 2 VOICE OVERLAY: We interrupt your usual scheduled programming with a breaking news story coming to us from the United States Space Exploration Garrison Outpost 001.

FADE IN IMAGE OF GARRISON LOGO

MUSIC RISE… HEADLINE “BREAKING NEWS”

ANCHOR 1 VOICE OVERLAY: Following President Kennedy’s visit and interview with Garrison personnel just two weeks ago, the Garrison has released an official statement regarding the rumors of a flight test gone wrong that resulted in the crash and injury of two cadets. One of the cadets in peril was Takashi Shirogane, known to personnel as ‘Shiro,’ whom Mr. Kennedy spoke with during his time at the Garrison.

MUSIC OUT… MEDIA TO FEED 2

ANCHOR 2 LIVE ON LOCATION: Following Wednesday’s disastrous incident, where a T-33 Starfire lost power in its right engine and crashed ten miles south of the Garrison base, the statement released just a few moments ago reveals that gross negligence of training aircraft by Lieutenant Commander Harold Iverson caused the jet to malfunction. Both cadets Shirogane and Waseb survived the crash, but cadet Shirogane remains in critical condition. Commander-in-chief Kennedy gave a brief word at a press conference following reports of the incident.

MEDIA FADE IN FEED 3

PRESIDENT JOHN F KENNEDY: I speak to you all today with great sadness in my heart to hear of the crash that resulted in injury to two cadets at Garrison Outpost 001, including Takashi Shirogane, whom I had the pleasure of speaking with just a few short weeks ago. He is a striking and capable young man, and I wish him and his fellow cadet Waseb a speedy recovery. Going forward, several changes are being drafted to change the United States maintenance and staff policies to ensure we never have another incident akin to this one. Thank you.

MUSIC UP… FADE IN NBC TITLE SCREEN

* * *

Consciousness comes and goes in snippets, like a film reel cut by kindergarten scissors.

He sees the wide-open sky, feels the throbbing of his head, tastes blood pooling in his mouth, and hears the telltale tick-tick-tick of a cooling motor. As if through a layer of cotton, he hears a familiar voice shouting his name, over and over and over, but Shiro can’t seem to call back.

Then there are the hands, the smell of alcohol and sterile wipes, the woman with wide eyes as she pushes him into the back of a transport vehicle, mouthing ‘it’s okay honey, it’s okay.’ _Adam_ , Shiro thinks blearily. _Where’s Adam?_

Boots, slapping against cheap linoleum as they race down a hallway. Shiro watches the ceiling panels flash by as he is rolled along. The lights blind his eyes and he closes them again.

A nurse, repeating the same question over and over while she prods his left arm. Shiro stares blankly at her, unable to even move his fingers. “Can you feel this? Can you feel this?” she asks like an unwound tape recorder. Shiro tastes bile in his throat when he shakes his head no.

The fifth time he wakes up, it is for good. Night must have fallen, because his room in the hospital ward is dark, only sources of light the crack under the door and the digital display of his vitals hanging above him. He blinks slowly, turning his head slightly to stretch his neck. His head throbs sharply, once, and Shiro heaves. Where is he? The steady pulse of the echogram tempers his breathing. Beep. In. Beep. Out. Beep. In. Beep. Out.

He reaches his right arm out, examining the bundle of tubes connected to the IV nestled in the crook of his elbow. It looks like every color is bleeding into his veins.

The crash comes back to him as if it is memories dripping into his bloodstream instead of morphine. Taking off. Flying, no, soaring across the desert with Adam whooping behind him. The shudder of the plane when the engine had gone out. The thick smell of smoke in the cabin. Watching the McDowell mountains creep closer. A disconnected emergency strap. One final maneuver to keep them alive.

_Adam_. Did Adam survive the crash? Shiro moves to jam his left elbow into the bed and propel himself up except –

He doesn’t move. His shoulder flexes, then spikes with pain, but he doesn’t ever rise off the starched white sheet.

Where his right arm extends out in front of him, swarmed with IVs and bruises, his left doesn’t move forward at all. In fact, it does not extend because when Shiro looks down, his arm doesn’t exist at all.

A stump wrapped carefully in neat white gauze, a couple inches below his rotator cuff.

Shiro pukes onto the perfect white sheets.

The next few hours blur together. He throws up, and then calls for a nurse, and an entire flurry of coats and stethoscopes come parading in. One checks his heart rate, the other his white blood cell count; another replaces one of the bags of fluid. He catches words that a patient-eyed doctor tells him. Severe concussion. Fractured ribs. Multiple abrasions. And then, more painful than the crash itself – amputated left arm.

He’d mangled it upon repair when the nose collapsed in when they hit the ground. By the time the plane had skidded to a stop, he’s told, he was already losing copious amounts of blood. His copilot ( _Adam_ , Shiro thinks, _he’s alive._ ) had drug his unconscious body out of the wreckage and tried his best to stop the bleeding with a rudimentary tourniquet. When the emergency response team arrived in a chopper minutes later, it was already too late.

“It’s been almost a week,” the same doctor tells him kindly. “You’re out of the woods for immediate danger from trauma or blood loss. We expect you to make a full recovery.”

But it is starfish who can regrow lost arms, not human boys. He can’t help himself from trying to reach for the cup of water on the bedside table with his left hand or turn the page of the newspaper that one of the nurses had brought for him. Even the television screen seems half as bright as it did before.

He keeps asking every nurse or doctor if he can see Adam, “you know, the other cadet in the crash. Is he okay? Can I see him? Please?” and every time, they give him the same answer. Yes, Cadet Waseb is stable. No, you aren’t cleared to leave the ICU yet.”

Shiro doesn’t know if hours or days have passed. The nurse keeps bringing him new newspapers, but they’re from all different dates – first Tuesday, then Wednesday, then the past Friday, then the Saturday after that. Time is Dali’s vicious experiment in patience and god is Shiro being tested.

The doctors pour in, one after another. Each one tells him that he’s lucky to be alive, that any other pilot wouldn’t have been able to land that plane, that he should be thankful that his copilot pulled him out of the wreckage before the plane ignited, and that even the fact that he’s conscious and lucent right now is a miracle.

“God bless the military personnel for acting so quickly,” one nurse tells him when she recounts his harrowing survival story (for about the fifteenth time, may he add). Shiro gives her a bitter grin.

“Wasn’t military personnel the reason I’m here anyway?” he asks, and she blinks at him owlishly before bustling away, unsure how to answer.

Gross negligence is what the news report says. Fired, Shiro overhears a gossiping nurse. He leans back against the bed of pillows and closes his eyes. No amount of pink slips or safety regulations is going to give him his arm back. That ship, as they say, has already sailed.

It has been exactly seventeen nurse shift rotations, three cycles through the morning news, and twelves newspapers of scattered dates when the door to Shiro’s room is opened and closed almost immediately after. He doesn’t bother opening his eyes. It seems like every other moment someone is coming in to check his vitals, or swap out fluids, or to lecture him on the grace of god for his miraculous survival.

The lights flick on. A rattling inhale comes from the door, one that almost sounds like –

“Fucking _hell_ , Shiro,” Allura says, back to the door and stepping to the side, stepping out of the way for the rattling breath, who is frozen with one hand on the doorknob.

“Allura.” Then: “Adam,” Shiro breathes. He has a strip of white tape across the bridge of his nose and sways against the crutches tucked under each of his arms. There is a fading bruise under his right eye, and he’s missing a good chunk of hair on that side too. But he’s alive, in one piece, standing five feet away from Shiro with the most incredulous look in his eyes.

“Takashi,” Adam says voice so _soft_ , and suddenly the space between them is closing and Adam is sliding his arms carefully around Shiro’s middle, careful not to press down on his bandaged ribs, and he smells like Garrison laundry soap and coffee and ink and _home_. “God, you’re okay,” and he’s letting out a choked sob, and Shiro is crying too, for the first time since he’s woken up with a bashed-in head and a missing arm, at the feeling of Adam – alive and warm – tucked against his chest.

Allura joins Adam at the side of the bed. “We don’t have a ton of time,” she says softy, and pulls a card from her satchel. “Commander Okybe pulled some strings to let us in, but the nursing department isn’t exactly thrilled.” She passes the card to Shiro. “The GSA made his for you.”

“Thanks, Allura,” Shiro says, muffled through the mess of Adam’s hair.

She smiles softly and runs her hand over his. “We’re really glad you’re alright.” Adam hums from Shiro’s chest. “I’ll let you two be and spread the word that you’re doing okay. Maybe get you copy of the recent news,” she says, glancing at the pile of haphazard newspapers on Shiro’s bedside. “Can I get you anything else?”

Shiro shakes his head no, not trusting himself to mutter anything but a choked, “Thanks, Allura.” Allura smiles, giving his hand one firm squeeze before resting the card on the table by his bed and turning toward the door.

“Keep it PG, okay boys?” she says over her shoulder as she opens the door, familiar teasing smile on her lips. Shiro feels himself snort out a laugh. Adam mumbles something that sounds like ‘fuck off, Allura,’ from where he’s still buired in Shiro’s chest.

Shiro curls his right arm up and around Adam’s back, laying his palm along the dip in his spine, trailing his fingers up and along each vertebra until his fist finds familiar brown hair. Adam, who is here, warm and solid underneath him. Alive.

Shiro finds the words that he’s been meaning to say long before the jet spiraled out of control. Long before they ever reached the tarmac, really.

“I love you too,” he whispers into the crown of Adam’s forehead. “I love you.”

They’re both still crying when Adam pulls back. His eyes are red, his nose running, tears still streaming down is cheeks when he speaks.

“How could you do that?” he reprimands, choking on the last syllable. “I told you to eject. You could have gotten out of there. It was my fault; I knew something was wrong as soon as we started the engines and I cleared us for takeoff anyways. You almost _died_. I thought you were dead when I pulled your fucking body out of an igniting plane, and I thought you were dead when they rushed you into a helicopter, and I thought you were dead when no one would tell me anything about where you were or how you were doing.” The tears are streaming again.

“How could you do that? Takashi, what am I to you?”

Shiro thinks about his answer. Adam, ready to die alone in an exploding plane, brave enough to try and coerce Shiro to safety. Adam, telling Shiro that he loved him when he thought there wasn’t going to be another chance to say it ever again. The curl of Adam’s smile, the warmth of his smooth hands against Shiro’s calloused. Adam, standing shoulder to shoulder with Shiro on a heavy day in June, tarmac and T-Bird shimmering before them. Shiro knew with absolute certainty in those blissful moments of freedom in flight and those staccato moments before they hit the ground exactly what Adam meant to him long before he was asked.

“Everything,” Shiro says.

And it is the truth.

* * *

epilogue

* * *

When the desert sun begins to peek over the ridges of the distant McDowell mountains, the sky turns a blushing pink. Twenty minutes later, and the sky is bathed in yellow and orange. Another twenty and all the colors have bled into blue. Shiro watches from the bridge of the launchpad, sipping his cup of morning coffee (strong, now, not the weak shit that the cafeteria served when he was a cadet) and feeling the swift uplifting rush of the morning breeze card through his hair. The metal tress creaks softly as another pair of Garrison-issue boots meet Shiro at the railing.

“Not too shabby of a sunrise, huh?” Adam asks. Shiro turns to him, darts quick peek left and right, and leans in. Adam reaches up to rest his hand against Shiro’s jaw, thumbing over the thick scar that bridges Shiro’s nose and ends mid-cheek. He hums into the kiss, a lazy smile etched onto his face when they pull away. “Enjoying the peace and quiet up here?”

“It’s about to get very not-quiet and not-peaceful,” Shiro muses. Below them, transport vehicles are already starting to dart around the tarmac, carrying last minute supplies and harried engineers. In the distance, he can already see the news vans crowded around the Garrison gate, waiting for their 7:05 press passes to let them in.

He takes another sip of his coffee and rests his prosthetic against the rail. The metal on metal lets out a muffled clang as they collide, blocked by the heavy canvas of Shiro’s flight jacket.

Well. Technically, it’s Adam’s flight jacket, but they’ve been dating long enough that Adam ought to know that everything in his closet _also_ belongs to Shiro.

“Are you nervous?” Shiro asks, watching an engineer disappear into the capsule of the shuttle.

“Mm,” Adam says beside him. “I guess. I always am, a little.” He pauses. “Are you?”

Shiro looks out past the shuttle, being loaded with final supplies, US flag decal on the side being buffed one last time, out to the endless breadth of the desert. He thinks of skimming across the surface on the old speeder with Adam, full of teenage recklessness and young love. He’s passed the speeder along now, to another kid with a head full of bullish ideas and a reckoning for getting into trouble. Keith, scraggly black hair that is certainly not within the Garrison regulated length but has such a wicked glare that no one dares tell him off for it. Except for Shiro, who could give less of a fuck about how long Keith’s hair is and more about if the kid is finally finding his footing as a first-year cadet.

Which he seems to be, because when Adam tossed his messenger bag onto the couch of their shared quarters last week he also tossed out that Ms. Carter told him that his favorite cadet (the lanky boy from Cuba with a megawatt smile - they’re not supposed to have favorites, but whatever, they’re practically war heroes, they do what they want to, Allura’s eternal frustration) and Shiro’s favorite (Keith) were spotted napping on the library couch together.

Anyways. Is he nervous? The rumble of a starting engine always strikes a beat of anxiety into Shiro’s chest ever since the accident. When the steering gets tight and Shiro feels the vibrations from turbulence rattle through the remains of his left arm, he calls the feeling caution. Gone are the days of reckless flying in the simulator or in an actual cockpit. And sure – every now and then he’ll stall the engine into a freefall just to be a dick and hear Adam swear so colorfully that Van Gogh would be jealous. No longer emboldened recklessness, but Shiro has fought to keep flying something that still makes him feel the way it did when he was seventeen years old. Lost, stumbling up to the doors of a towering concrete building, then found within its walls. Found in a rickety simulator, in a library doing homework, in a secret meeting at night, in the smile of a boy who took every ounce of fear and hesitation in Shiro’s heart and wrung it out to dry.

“Well.” Shiro hesitates. “We’ve already been through hell on Earth – quite literally, may I add – so we might as well spread the wealth, give the moon a taste of hell too.”

Adam rolls his eyes and grabs the sleeve of his – Shiro’s jacket and gives a yank. “I’m not planning on any death-defying stunts out there, space cadet. Now c’mon, Allura is already in the briefing room for all the last-minute shit that people forgot to tell us in the last year that we’ve been planning for this mission.”

Shiro digs his feet in when Adam starts walking toward the door that leads back into the air-conditioned cool of the hallway. There’s something else he came up here to do, a reason he got Allura to send Adam up here.

“What?” Adam turns around. “Seriously, Allura sent me up here to find – _ohmygod_.”

“I’m not nervous about the mission,” Shiro says, the metal grate of the bridge digging into his knee. He sets the coffee cup onto the metal and uses his good hand to dig in the pocket of Adam’s – his jacket. “But I am nervous about this.”

He takes a deep breath and pulls out the chain from his pocket, where two gold bands clink against each other and shimmer as they twist in the morning sunlight.

“You can’t be doing this right now!” Adam says, incredulous, but his hands are coming up to cover his mouth, which is widening into a smile.

“Adam, you beat me to a confession when you told me that you loved me in a tanking airplane when neither of us thought we were going to make it out alive.” Shiro steadies his breath. “And later, you asked me what I meant to you, what could possibly make me pilot that jet onto the sands of the Sonoran Desert and get my arm chopped off instead of parachuting to safety. And I told you that you meant everything to me seven years ago, and I’m telling you that you still mean everything to me now. That if there is one thing that I’m sure of in this universe, it isn’t steady altitude gauges or consistent altitudes. You are the constant in my life. You are my stability, you are my rock, and most importantly, you are my best friend. And before we climb into a space shuttle with absolutely no guarantee that we’re coming back, I want you to know that I’m not afraid of dying. What I’m most afraid of is losing you.”

Adam shakes himself out of his stupor, voice cracking on the first syllable in the telltale way that means he’s about to cry. “Y-”

“I haven’t even asked yet!” Shiro cuts him off, laughing. His chest feels tight too, but the good kind of tight. Eager, so happy that he can’t help but feel his heartbeat hammering through his shirt. “So, Adam, will you do me the honor of being my copilot in life?” He holds the two rings on his outstretched palm.

Adam, still crying, yanks Shiro to his feet and pulls him into a sloppy kiss. “Only if you’re flying,” he breathes into the space between them. Adam kisses him again, and it feels like a beginning. Like the dawn of a new day, of a new mission, of a new adventure. “Yes, Takashi. Yes.”

And there, with the Apollo 11 towering in the background, the ground control team racing from station to station, the news vans racing along the dirt road, hungry for the best camera angle, Shiro clasps a chain with a gold ring dangling on the end around Adam’s neck and stands quietly when he does the same in return.

When the pale blue of the sky turns to atmospheric red, Shiro loves Adam. When the red of Earth’s parting flames turns to black with pinpricks of familiar light – there, the _hoshi_ that his father used to point to when they laid on their backs under a heavy blanket of sky – Shiro loves Adam. And when Matt switches off the comm line for a moment and says in a perfectly deadpan voice: “Oh no. How ever could we have lost connection?” Shiro leans across the center console of the pilot seat and wraps a hand around the back of Adam’s neck and closes the gap between them, a hundred thousand miles away from the world,

and kisses him.

_the future is a blue sky and a full_

_tank of gas. I saw the future, I did,_

_and in it I was alive._

-Neil Hilborn, “The Future”

**Author's Note:**

> whew! there it is, y'all. thanks for sticking with me. drop a comment below or send me an ask on tumblr if you enjoyed it, I use validation as fuel for being alive.  
> [happyleakira](https://happyleakira.tumblr.com/)  
> and once again, the amazing art that inspired this whole piece.  
> [and all I can taste is this moment](https://kaiayame.tumblr.com/post/176133732670/and-all-i-can-taste-is-this-moment)  
> until next time!


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